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 narrative. My method is defined by a reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the works themselves. 

I develop this method in my first book, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, entitled Remittances, Literary & Economic, a study of novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora. Framing remittances as a heuristic for reading the entangled circulation of labor, value, ideas, and texts, the book reveals the unexpected role that the development and dissemination of English-language literature played in the twentieth-century transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest exporters of labor.

I have presented work from this project at New York University, Harvard, Yale, the University of the Philippines, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke.