research
work + teaching + conferences
research
I’m currently completing my PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. In my doctoral work, I research contemporary Asian American autofiction. Lately, I’ve been writing about racialised affect, racialised dissonance, and the diasporic subject’s right to opacity.
teaching + guest lectures
Last year, I received a teaching fellowship in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Since 2019, I’ve been invited to present guest lectures across Creative Writing, Media Studies, Journalism and Cultural Studies courses, at institutions like CUNY, RMIT and the University of Melbourne.
conferences
I have presented both on my doctoral research and my editorial work for Liminal both in Australia and internationally. In 2024, I visited Seattle to present on Maxine Hong Kingston’s autofictive legacies at the Association for Asian American Studies conference, and was invited to attend the American Studies Program at the Salzburg Global Seminar in September.
This July, I will be giving the Barry Andrews address at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference.
ASAL & IABA Asia-Pacific Conference
Barry Andrews Memorial Address, 30 June 2025
“Of words, of memories, of lies”: On Asian Australian autofiction
In a nation historically (and presently) so hostile to the fact of the non-White body, how might such hostility appear in our writing work? This paper considers how Asian Australian autofiction both sits within, and arcs against, the short history of Australia and its literary tradition, so often marked by hoaxes and imposture. Thinking alongside the work of André Dao, Brian Castro and Nam Le, this paper proposes that the autofictive gesture opens new possibilities for the racialised writer. In Shanghai Dancing (2003), Castro writes, “everything in history is always wrapped in a tissue; of words, of memories, of lies.” Shifting restlessly between fact and fiction, disclosure and disavowal, these writers tear at this tissue.