I am an Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine, Director of UCI Global Asias, and co-director, with Prof. Yousuf Al-Bulushi, of the Geographers at UCI Research Cluster. I hold courtesy appointments in Asian American Studies and East Asian Studies. I am a senior editor at Hyphen magazine, which I co-founded, and serve on the editorial board of the journal American Literary History. Since 2023, I have been a Mellon New Directions Fellow focusing on human geography and Taiwan studies.

I received my PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley, and was formerly a UC Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the English department at UC Riverside. My research and writing have focused on 20/21st c. Anglophone and Asian/American cultural production, Northeast Asian political economy, and speculative fiction.

My first book, Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia University Press, 2024), argues that contemporary Asian American fiction, like the class identities of its authors, passes through a two cultures conflict between the arts and sciences, which is an abiding legacy of modernization projects spanning Japanese, American, and now Chinese imperial histories, each of which emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization.

I am also co-editor of Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2025), along with David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu.

I am currently working on two books. The first is about the trope of China’s rise in fiction and film. The second is a cultural history of semiconductors, centering on the industry’s emergence in Taiwan.

In addition to Hyphen, my writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Anthropology and Humanism, College Literature, the Journal of Asian American Studies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Post45, Public Books, The New Inquiry, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. I have also appeared on podcasts like Sinica, Novel Dialogue, and the New Books Network.

I am a second-generation Taiwanese American, born and raised in Houston, Texas.