Research

My research centers on Asian American and multiethnic cultural studies and is informed by my training in American studies and English. Yet, I always hesitate to describe my work in such terms because research for me is a process of encounter that defies disciplinary (and even interdisciplinary) boundaries. Taking the advice of my mentors,

I read as far and as widely as a I can.

I go, in short, wherever my research questions and interests take me in the service of proliferating minoritized subjects and knowledges. I look for those texts that have the potential to excite, unsettle, provoke, disorientate, and detach me from “common sense” understandings of the world. Perhaps that’s why I find myself, time and time again, drawn to speculative aesthetics because of how they introduce readers to new modes of seeing, sensing, thinking, and being in the world, and how they attune us to the possibility of other worlds.

My research has also taken me elsewhere. It has brought me into contact with queer theories of temporality and scholarship in African American and African diasporic studies, the digital humanities, and women’s studies. It has compelled me to engage in archival work (and simultaneously to question the archive), and to examine popular visual cultures and animation technologies. More recently, my research has led me to think through indigenous cosmologies, transpacific solidarities, sinking islands, and the concepts of quantum entanglement and the anthropocene.

And still, I’m excited for where it will lead me in time.

For now,

Frances

Photo by kaboompics on Pixabay.