I am a comparativist who works primarily in Japanese and English with additional interests in Spanish and Portuguese. I approach the study of Asian American literature (and literatures of Asia and the Americas) with special attention to the generative frictions within and among multiple languages.
My research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. I am the translator of Lament in the Night (Kaya Press 2012), a collection of two novels by Shōson Nagahara, an author who wrote for a Japanese reading public in Los Angeles during the 1920s. This translation received an Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies in 2014.
My first monograph, Issei Failures: The Lost Generation of Japanese American Literature (forthcoming in 2027 from Stanford University Press), examines how entrenched understandings of generational history in Japanese American studies have systematically impaired the study of figures who fail to conform to narratives of generational success and succession. Issei Failures provides new and revived methods for understanding the writings of these generational failures, men who lived and wrote in the United States at the same time as the Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants), but due to historical circumstance and poltical orientation, failed to become Issei forefathers of later generations of Japanese American literature. This monograph builds upon my previous research, published in Roots of the Issei: Exploring Japanese American Newspapers (Hoover Institution Press, 2018), which demonstrates that the generational term "Issei" was academic jargon in the 1910s and only entered wider use in the mid-1920s. Most of the Japanese immigrants who we now call "Issei" would not have used, or even understood, this term for most of their early years of residence in the United States.
In 2023, I began working as a project-editor for the Tessaku Translation Project, and initiative which is producing advance draft translations of all nine issues of a Japanese-language literary journal published at the Tule Lake Segregation Center from 1944-1945. This work builds upon earlier translations I prepared for The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration (eds. Floyd Cheung and Frank Abe, Penguin 2024).
Since 2021, I have served as a scholar-editor for the Issei Poetry Projectat the Japanese Community and Cultural Center (JACCC - Los Angeles). I have also been working on translations of the writings of feminist proletarian writer Ginko Okazaki and of early Japanese American drama -- most recently in the form of a (2022) staged reading of Nagahara Hideaki's 1928 play Sariyukumono (The Ones Who Leave).
Prior to joining the faculty of UC Berkeley in 2018, I was an assistant professor of English and Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University (2012-2018). I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, Japanese, Spanish) from UC Berkeley in 2012, and completed my B.A. in Comparative Literature (English, Spanish, Mathematics) at Dartmouth College in 2003.
I have taught courses on 19th and 20th century Japanese literature, American literature, Asian American literature, modernist literature in Asia, international law and literature, manga and graphic novels, and Westerns and Japanese period drama.
Third-person pronouns: he/him.
