Courses in Development

San José State University

Instructor of Record, Fall 22/Spring 23

AAS 001: Introduction to Asian American Studies

This course introduces students to the tenets, histories, and contradictions of Asian American experiences from an interdisciplinary perspective. Focusing on a comparative analysis rather than a siloed study of disparate ethnic communities, students learn how capitalist exploitation, war, settler colonialism, imperialism, non/citizenship, and resistance have shaped the lives of those captured within the rubric of Asian American.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Instructor of Record, Fall 21

AAS/GWS/LLS 300: Theories of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

This course examines theories of race, gender, and sexuality from the perspective of critical and comparative ethnic studies. Through key texts and emerging debates, this course will equip students will the tools to interrogate the shifting structural conditions that have differentially distributed life chances for bodies and communities marked for premature death. At the same time, we will examine modes and methods of resistance through theory and action. This course will also task students to write about and produce interdisciplinary research – capaciously conceived – across, within, and beyond a variety of fields and objects (cultural studies, visual culture, history, ethnography, etc.) In short, this course is designed to provide students with a foundation to critically engage with and write about the complex imbrications of race, gender, and sexuality with specific reference to thinkers that circulate in critical and comparative ethnic studies. 

University of California, Santa Cruz

Instructor of Record, Summer 19

HISC 106: U.S. Horror Film: Race, Capitalism, and Monsters

In Capital, Karl Marx uses the figure of a familiar monster in order to illustrate the centrality of death in a capitalist system: “capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Centuries later, filmmaker Wes Craven observes cultural uses of horror and its sociohistorical contexts, where filmgoers spectate stories of gore, the unknown, and sinister “to have the terror of real life marshaled into some sort of order, so it can be dealt with.” Following from these thinkers who deploy monstrous, supernatural, and otherwise unsettling figures to allegorize and critique the conditions of social reproduction under capitalist modernity, this course will analyze films and images to consider how the genre of horror has screened the problems, expectations, and fantasized afterlives of racism, labor exploitation, ruin, and war in the U.S. context.  

Instructor of Record, Spring 19

HISC 117: Making the Refugee Century

This interdisciplinary course examines the cultural discourse and systems of knowledge that have created the refugee century and the responses to it. Through historical texts, social theory, images, fiction, and film, this course asks how the refugee is embedded in a larger system of imperialism, geopolitics, and racial capitalism in order to understand how the refugee represents the normative order of our contemporary world rather than its aberration. In doing so, this course challenges constructions of “good” and “bad” refugees in need of saving and ways that refugees complicated questions about the (non)politics of human rights discourse and the complicity of the U.S. nation-state in ongoing crises of humanitarian and racialized violence.  

Teaching Assistant, 16-17

HAVC 80: Colonial Histories and Legacies: Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

CRES 100: Comparative Theories of Race and Ethnicity

HAVC 43: History of Modern Architecture

University of California, Los Angeles

Teaching Assistant, 13-14

AAS 50: Asian American Women

AAS M116: Asian American Social Movements

AAS 20: Asian American Communities