Bristol Cave La-Costa "Sexual Policing and Immigration Policy in the United States at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" While much research has focused on Chinese Exclusion laws as mostly male-oriented, I consider how the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and 1875 Page Act, which excluded “immoral” immigrants, contributed to categories of sexual morality for Chinese women.   Friday Forum Winter […]

"Homozionism: 'From the Closet into the Knesset'" My project focuses on the role of sexual politics in Israel's settler colonial occupation of Palestine, international (queer) complicities, and anti-colonial queer resistance. For this presentation I look forward to discuss the first chapter of my dissertation that charts the globally celebrated genealogy of Israel's gay movement from […]

"Enemy Inside Out: Birth Defects in Fallujah" Hotly debated and widely misunderstood is the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq. While the possibility of knowing the exact cause of this epidemic is diluted by ongoing war, layers of chemical toxicity, and mass displacement/destruction of doctors, patients, and medical facilities; the surrounding enviro-medical discourse is […]

"Polemics of Disintegration: Advaita Metaphysics in the Works of Alejandro Jodorowsky" The Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929) often engages with non-linearity and non-sense as narrative devices in his work. Throughout his career Jodorowsky's thematic repertoire has adopted elements of the Kabbalistic science of the Marseille tarot, European alchemy, and New Age formulations of Hindu […]

"Historicizing Interviews: A Mode of (Re)living and (Re)writing Memories of the Korean War through Documentary" How can we write a history of the officially unsaid and the unsayable? My talk focuses on the case of the Korean War whose language of antagonism and ideological conflict remains very much alive in Korean society today. I will […]

"Black Storm Clouds and a Queer Yellow Light: Reading the Affective Edges of Symbolism in Maru" My project is to read postcolonial novels that have typically been analyzed as representations of postcolonial politics and instead attend to the nonrepresentational aspects of their language: namely, their affect and literariness. In this talk I focus on Bessie […]

"Writing Hawai'i into the Nation: Narrative Re-mapping in Mark Twain's Letter's s a Colonial Prelude to Annexation" This portion of my dissertation project examines the 1866 letters written by Mark Twain (while dispatched by The Sacramento Union in Hawai'i) as engaged in the colonial process of cartographic incorporation by encouraging American ambitions in, and imaginings […]

Sustainable Happy cows: Change and Sustainability in California Dairies  California dairy advertisements often feature happy cows, but they mask social and environmental concerns over industrial milk production. Currently, California dairy producers face a mix of challenges with severe drought, regulation of methane emissions from cows, uncertain changes in milk pricing policies, and future implementation of […]

Sewing the Forest like a state: Forest Management, Wildlife Conservation, and Center-Periphery Relations in Northeast China, 1949 - 1965 My research aims to counter the prevalent premise that Mao-era China (1945-1976) was devoid of environmental consciousness or concern with environmental protection, and places Chinese policy in the context of the international development of environmental consciousness […]