My research and teaching focus on the culture and literature of Asian Americans, Latinxs, and racialized communities in the U.S. I study the powers of culture to reveal related struggles and envision solidarities across different groups. My first book, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America (Stanford University Press 2020), traces a shared narrative form to reveal that the literatures, histories, and political struggles of Asian Americans and Latinxs are intertwined.
I’m working on a new book project, “Racial Entanglements.” It traces the fates of different racial groups, environments, sites, and species as they are knotted together across Asia, the Pacific, and the U.S. This project seeks a more capacious view of race that recognizes how groups, species, things, and environments are all active players in the tangled story of race and empire. I follow writers and artists from Asian American, Pacific Islander, Latinx, African American, and Native American communities who are developing an entanglement aesthetics to help us perceive this knotty story.
The other branch of my research builds data-driven methods to understand Asian American culture at a systemic scale. I’m the author of The Canon of Asian American Literature, the largest data collection on Asian American literature ever assembled. This data project allows us to see the evolution of the Asian American canon and to scrutinize who has been included and excluded in this process. With this data, my research team is uncovering the stories of progress, conflict, and inequality in the formation of Asian American literature.
I regularly teach courses on Asian American, Latinx, and multi-ethnic American culture, race theory, relational race studies, the Vietnam War and Southeast Asian refugees, U.S. empire, and narrative forms. My courses are collaborative spaces where students and I work together to unpack questions of culture, power, and race. To tackle such difficult questions, we build a culture of care and support that helps us take intellectual risks and find fresh possibilities.
Selected Publications:
“Racial Entanglements: Tracing the Transpacific Impacts of Pu‘uloa, ‘Iliahi, and Hawaiian Anticolonial Struggle.” Journal of Asian American Studies 29, no. 1 (2026): 1-30. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/991689
“The Canon of Asian American Literature.” Edited by Alexander Manshel, J.D. Porter, and Melanie Walsh. Post 45 Data Collective, 2025. https://data.post45.org/posts/asian-american-literature/
“Local Color to Multiculturalism: Minority Writers in the Short Story and Ethnographic Markets.” In The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, edited by Michael J. Collins and Gavin Jones, 174-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
“#BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling, and the Fate of the 2020 ‘Racial Awakening,’” with Richard Jean So and Maria Antoniak, New Literary History, 53, no. 4 / 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2022 /Winter 2023): 667-692.
“The Asian American Literature We’ve Constructed,” with Kate Hao, Post45 no. 7/ Journal of Cultural Analytics no. 4 (April 2021): 146-179. https://post45.org/2021/04/the-asian-american-literature-weve-constructed/
“Narrating the Transnational: Refugee Routes, Communities of Shared Fate, and Transnarrative Form.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. 43, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 106-128.
“Bildungsroman Hermeneutics in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” American Literature 90, no. 1 (March 2018): 141-170.
“A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method,” with Ryan Heuser. Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, 2012. https://litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets/#LLP04
“Learning to Read Data: Bringing out the Humanistic in the Digital Humanities,” with Ryan Heuser, Victorian Studies 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 79-86.
