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. I read across literary and economic history and bring archival research to the study of the novel. My method is defined by a reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the works themselves. 

I develop this archival and formalist method in my current book project, “Remittances, Literary & Economic,” a study of novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora. Theorizing remittances as a heuristic for reading the connections between the circulation of labor and value on the one hand, and the circulation of ideas and texts on the other, 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 exporters of labor. I have shared parts of the book project in progress at New York University, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of the Philippines, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University.