I am a creative writer, artistic collaborator, and doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, I led the AmLit graduate working group and served as a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CETLI) where I hold a Certificate in College and University Teaching. I specialize in Asian American and Asian diasporic studies with a focus on contemporary poetry and poetics. 

My dissertation project, “Lyric Torsion: The Spatial Logics of Dissociation,” begins with psychoanalytic dissociation: the idea that our human existence, including its claim on knowing and being, is contingent upon states of multiplicity. Torsion, from the Latin torquere, is defined as “the act of twisting, the force that causes twisting, or the state of being twisted.” Each of torsion’s multipronged definitions—as an action, a force, and a state of being—guide my intervention into the process through which contemporary Asian American poets revise, through disaggregation and re-assemblage, the racial self and subject at the center of a dissociated poetics. I draw on the psychoanalytic concept of racial dissociation and its critique of a universal, pathologized “lyric I” cloaked in whiteness to study how race and racialization affect a person’s ability to negotiate an array of competing social realities under an illusion of wholeness. By locating the dissociative friction of self-splitting in contemporary poetry, I trace the visceral torsion of psychic displacement through the composite of the seeing, sensing “lyric I.” I do this by attending to the logic of space and movement that emerges from the charged encounter between the history of the racial subject and the subject of racial history. Through the prism of the “lyric I” envisaged in the poetry, alternatives to modern lyric subjectivity emerge as anchors, forging new currents of thought in Asian American studies.

Before coming to Penn, I worked as the content strategist and brand voice of a professional development company.