Ryan Ku works across Asian diasporic, Southeast Asian, and multiethnic American literatures after World War II in the context of history beyond boundaries. In his first book project, Imperial Wounds: Filipino/American Novels and Late Modernity, he reads ethnic American narratives with Filipino novels, thus as postcolonial texts. This integration is based on the Filipino’s “structurally queer” position as a subject that, in not fitting into the terms of minority multiculturalism, points instead to U.S. empire history as a traumatic foundation of ethnicity in the nation. More broadly, he is interested in narrative and media that index the nation’s internal contradictions with the transpacific scenes of liberal modernity. Cultivating a critical practice attentive to story, discourse, and context, he also treats reading as an opportunity to philosophize about language, knowledge, reality, temporality, and ecology. As a teacher, he aims to let students explore the world through texts, thereby know the other and the self.