scholarship

My current monograph, “How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body” is a theoretical, cultural, and sociological study of race, robots, and the Asian American body in the context of the United States. In this study, I relate major instances of the robot as racialized and of the Asian American body as mechanized, in order to explain the intersections of race and/as emerging technology. Specifically, my book addresses a key concern of our digital age—the human/machine analytic—through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality.

I have a broad range of scholarly interests within the fields of ethnic, cultural, new media, queer, and Korean American Studies. As an undergraduate, I received a McNair scholarship for my analysis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) portrayals in the leading Korean American magazine, KoreAm Journal. My undergraduate thesis was the first scholarly writing on Korean American media and LGBT issues and was published in UCLA’s Amerasia Journal in 2006. With Dr. Brittney Cooper, I co-edited “Hacking the (Black/White) Binary” a special Issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (January 2015).