Paul Nadal
Princeton University
Paul Nadal
Princeton University
I am an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where I teach courses on Asian American literature, global Anglophone literature, and literary theory.
My recent article, “Cold War Remittance Economy”︎ American Quarterly 73.3 (2021), received the 1921 Best Essay Prize, which is annually awarded by the American Literature Society for "the best article in any field of American literature."
I am also an Elected Delegate (2020-2023) for the CLCS Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic at the Modern Language Association.
︎︎ nadal@princeton.edu
Research
What can literature tell us about political economy and what can political economy tell us about literature?
I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature and economy, with a particular focus on Asian American and Philippine Anglophone literature. Reading across literary and economic history, I bring archival research to the study of the novel and Marxist aesthetic theory to develop a multiscalar reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the work itself.
I bring these research interests together in my current book project, Remittances, Literary & Economic, which develops the first sustained inquiry into the convergence between novels and remittances, or the money that migrant workers send home. Theorizing remittances not only as currency but as a heuristic for reading intersecting circulations of literature, people, ideas, and value, the book uncovers the surprising role that English-language literature played in the twentieth-century transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest labor export economies. It argues that an important precursor to the migrant worker was the overseas writer, whose narratives of return envisaged remittances as comprising forms of labor that are part of, but remain irreducible to, market calculations of social life.
My second project extends my ongoing interest in Marxist aesthetic theory and literary and economic history through a dual study of neoliberalism’s racial forms and Asian American literary emergence, tracing today’s digitally-driven knowledge economy to Cold War-era debates about race, family, time, and neoliberal human capital formation.
Background
I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a dissertation fellow at the Institute of International Studies under the direction of Colleen Lye and Judith Butler. Before coming to Princeton, I held a visiting assistant professorship at The New School in New York City and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Wellesley College.
I was born and raised in the Philippines and currently live in Princeton, NJ.
I was born and raised in the Philippines and currently live in Princeton, NJ.