Class of 2022
Hometown: Cary, NC
Major: Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Minor: History
Mellon Project: Excavating the Afterlives of Empire through Asian/American Women's Poetry
I use Asian/American women's poetry to explore how colonialism, war, and imperialism continue in the present for Asian diasporic women. In my first chapter, I rely upon Emily Jungmin Yoon's A Cruelty Special to Our Species to connect her contemporary sexualization as a Korean/American women with histories of Korean comfort women under Japanese colonialism and Korean camptown sex workers, who serviced American soldiers during the Korean War. In my second chapter, I conduct visual analysis of Vietnamese/American Diana Nguyen's photopoems in Ghost Of, crafted out of family pictures that her brother cut himself out of before he died by suicide; I use this collection to unravel memory in relation to the Vietnam War and Vietnamese refugees. My final chapter, that I am currently working on, engages with Fatimah Asghar's poetry collection If They Come For Us, to understand the history of Partition and her experience as a queer Muslim American woman in the United States.
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