Bridging global early modern studies, critical race studies, and Asian American studies, my research examines how race, religion and aesthetics intersect in textual sources and visual arts of colonial Latin America and Iberian Asia. More broadly, my teaching and scholarship engage questions of extractive and settler colonialism, queer relationalities in the archive, and the afterlives of transpacific slavery and indenture labor in contemporary visual, literary, and curatorial practices.
My monograph in process, The Devotional Archives of Empire: Race, Religion, and the Early Modern Transpacific examines how religion, unfree labor, and colonial governance jointly produced racial inequality across the Pacific World. Focusing on Portuguese India and the Viceroyalty of New Spain (including the Spanish Philippines), the book challenges narratives of early modern “spiritual conquest” by showing that missionary projects in East and Southeast Asia were inseparable from transoceanic systems of slavery and coerced mobility. Drawing on multilingual textual and material archives—including hagiographies, legal records, religious theater, and decorative objects—the project traces how Asiatic racial difference emerged through intersecting logics of color, gender, religious exemplarity, legal status, and labor. By foregrounding the epistemic violence of colonial archives, the book reconceptualizes early modern race as a global formation rooted in extractive colonialism, extending critical race studies beyond Atlantic frameworks to the linked histories of Maritime Asia and the early Americas.
My second long-term project examines the shifting legal personhood of Asian indentured laborers across the nineteenth-century Pacific World (the Philippines, the Caribbean, Peru, and Hawai‘i).
My research has been supported by The Newberry Library, The Renaissance Society of America, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and UChicago’s Center for East Asian Studies, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Committee on Southern Asian Studies, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. I am the recipient of Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship in 2024 and The Amy Williamsen Award for outstanding graduate student presentation at GEMELA (Grupo de Estudios sobre la Mujer en España y las Américas pre-1800) Biennial Conference in 2022.
At UChicago, I have taught Asian American history and literature, academic writing, Spanish language and literature. I have also served as coordinators of Early Modern and Mediterranean Worlds Workshop (2021-22, 2023-24) and Gender and Sexuality Studies Working Group (2022-23).
In addition to my postdoctoral appointment, I am currently teaching critical theory, fashion, writing & research at Parsons School of Design (The New School) in New York City.
Selected Publications:
“The Transpacific Turn in Early Modern Iberian Critical Race Studies.” Special Issue of Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies: “Approaching Premodern Critical Race Studies in Iberia and Latin America” (forthcoming)
“History and Brown Jouissance: A Roundtable Discussion.” With Amy Hollywood and Amber Musser. Special Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies: “Time after Time: Cruising the Past” (forthcoming)
“The Surfaces of Four Continents: An Eighteenth-Century Secretary Desk from Puebla.” In Ambivalent Harmonies: Representing Peace in Times of Conflict in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds. Edited by Maria Vittoria Spissu and Marta Albalá Pelegrín. Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Leiden: Brill Publishers (forthcoming).
“Chinos Before the Yellow Race: Catarina de San Juan, the Achinada Mystic of New Spain.” Colonial Latin American Review 34.2(2025): 135-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2025.2504292
Exhibition Review of Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025), ASAP/Review. https://asapjournal.com/review/ornate-grievance-monstrous-beauty-at-the-met/
“The Scenic/Sensorial Alacena: A Feminine Interplay Between Visuality and Tactility in La dama duende.” Romance Notes 62.3 (2022): 563-77. https://doi.org/10.1353/rmc.2022.0043
“A Metatheatrical Reading of the Baroque and the Neobaroque Text: Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and De donde son los cantantes (1967).” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 73.4 (2019): 233-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.2019.1675311