INTRODUCTION
I am a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine. I also serve as an affiliate faculty in the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, and Asian American Studies, and as core faculty in the PhD Program in Culture & Theory.
I also currently serve as Director of the International Center for Writing & Translation, and Director of the Program in Global Languages & Cultures.
I have been teaching at UCI since 2014, shortly after earning my PhD from the University of Arizona. Living in the US-Mexico borderlands has had a lasting impact on my approach to research, where I remain committed to inquiries surrounding borders, both literal and figurative, along with spaces in-between more generally, and how they shape cultural phenomena, social relations, and everyday life. My recent work, in particular, focuses on the intersections between language and globalization, especially as they emerge in various realms such as in global Englishes, multilingualism, ethnic/national identification, language education, and world literature.
My book, Locating Translingualism, published with Cambridge University Press, is the winner of the 2024 American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award.
My latest book, Language as Hope, co-authored with Daniel N. Silva, was published in 2024 with Cambridge University Press. Based on a longstanding collaboration with Silva, the book foregrounds what language can teach us about the practice, logic, and feasibility of hope into the 21st century. We look to how those from the Brazilian urban peripheries, who have grown accustomed to unrelenting prejudice and violence on an everyday basis, use language to survive and imagine futures that are worth aspiring to. In so doing, this book foregrounds how language becomes a matter of survival for communities on the peripheries and also how they use language to hope in ways that are instructive for all.
My current major projects include:
- The Handbook of Translanguaging, co-edited with Li Wei, Ofelia García, and Prem Phyak (under contract with Wiley-Blackwell)
- Entangled Englishes, co-edited with Sofia Rüdiger (under contract with Routledge)
- Imagined Antagonisms, co-authored with Chungjae Lee, which outlines how antagonism is central to Korea’s project of imagining, representing, and sustaining itself as a cosmopolitan nation in the 21st century.
Click here to view a list of some of my recent and/or representative publications.