MY TEACHING SPANS THE AREAS OF ETHNIC STUDIES, CULTURAL HISTORY AND MEDIA STUDIES, WITH A SPECIAL FOCUS ON HISTORIES OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES AND US-MIDDLE EAST RELATIONS.

The key questions that animate my research are integral to the way that I think through sources and theoretical concepts with my students. I am keenly aware of how historical representation and racialization factors into the way we think about the U.S. national landscape and the individuals that shape it. And so much of how we think is constructed by what we consume. As a teacher, I encourage students to bring their whole selves into the classroom in order to make critical connections among theoretical concepts, historical and cultural texts, and their own subjectivities. My classroom environments center student participation and skill building in writing and analysis that can be transferred outside the classroom.

Asian americans and third world solidarity (@ NORTHWESTERN)

In this course, students explore concepts for analyzing the historical study and legacies of Third Worldism and its relationship to Asian America. Through interdisciplinary texts that span history, ethnic studies, literature, and ethnography, students learn how solidarities have historically come to form as they become entangled with other social structures including gender and space. The course begins with laying the historical foundations for the emergence of Third World solidarities in the 1960s and 1970s, before turning to the components of Third World feminisms and the movements’ contemporary legacies. The course’s final project asks students to create an Instagram resource guide, as they engage critically with the possibilities and limits of social media.

race and nation in the u.s.: Belonging, longing, and resistance
(@ Brown & NORTHWESTERN)

This course examines how representations of race continue to be critical to the formation of the American nation. We will look at cultural and historical texts that grapple with how “race” is used to (1) define who does and does not belong to the U.S., (2) configure feelings of longing for a homeland, and (3) resist dominant narratives of national inclusion through activism and representation. The course uses Middle Eastern Americans as its primary case study of these larger themes, while incorporating readings that touch on other minoritized identities.

transnational asian/american activism (@ NORTHWESTERN)

Both Asian American and Asian immigrant activism in the United States has been critical to resistance against systems of racial oppression in this country and its transnational, imperial connections abroad. This course is meant to provide students with a greater understanding of Asian diasporas in the United States and strategies of activist resistance from the beginning of the twentieth century into the present. Special attention will be paid to the role of student activism—both Asian American and Asian immigrant—as well as the role of historical and ethnographic methodologies in studying such paths for change. As a final project, students will create their own digital zines that discuss some aspect of Asian American activism that is rooted in scholarship but still accessible to the larger community.

us media representations of the middle east (@ NORTHWESTERN)

In this course, students explore the evolving ways in which the Middle East is visually represented in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present, post-9/11 era. This area has been depicted in film and image in conflicting ways: exotic, criminal, irrational, oppressive, barbaric, fantastical…This course will examine the ways in which visual culture shapes understandings and legitimizes knowledge of Southwest Asia/North Africa and its communities that ultimately bolster U.S. geopolitical interests and imperial ambition. Through discussing film, television, and photographic journalism alongside critical works of cultural analysis, we will work through how cultural objects come to function as salient social and political texts that pervade U.S. publics and how they deploy issues of race, gender and sexuality.

meeting asian/arab american studies (@ harvard)

In this course, we will explore, expand, and question the disciplinary boundaries between Asian American and Arab American Studies. Grounded in converging critiques of US empire, we will ask: what are the possibilities and limitations of linking these two fields in shared struggle and solidarity? What can each field give to and take from the other, and how are they already intersecting? The course is organized around major topics in Asian American and Arab American studies—such as questions of the refugee, war & violence, incarceration, and labor—as a way of uncovering the overlapping nature of these two sub-fields within the interdisciplinary field of Ethnic Studies.

public course offerings

I am also committed to the work of making scholarship accessible to those outside of academia.

I believe that the ideas and concepts we discuss in the academy should be introduced to audiences far beyond the ivory tower. It is my hope that in teaching courses open to the public, we will develop a shared vocabulary of understanding that allows us to communicate more effectively and draw attention to solving structural issues in U.S. society.

FOUNDATIONS OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES (IN COLLABORATION WITH THE READING, summer 2022)

This is for all the Asian & Asian American identifying folks who want to think more about the history of their communities in the United States. It’s about coming together as a collective, thinking about the flows and friction of people, labor, capital, and ideas that got us to where we are. It’s about recognizing the history of our communities and how we can integrate them into our visions of the future.

Perhaps you weren’t able to take an Asian American Studies course during college—maybe because you just weren’t interested at the time, or you had other things on your plate that you needed to prioritize. Perhaps you didn’t go to college at all, and a course like this was entirely inaccessible to you. This course is meant to introduce folks to the major themes of the field of Asian American Studies, while also providing a history of Asian America based on migration, labor, and race.