I am a Ph.D. candidate (A.B.D.) in the Department of English at the University of Florida, with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. I am currently living in Los Angeles completing my dissertation/book about the history of American cuteness and the reception of Japanese kawaii in the United States. My primary areas of research and teaching are Childhood Studies, Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture, Transnational Asian-American studies, and gender and feminist theory.
Last year, I was the Henry Darger Study Center Research Fellow at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. As a result, I helped curate the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition “The Private Collection of Henry Darger,” which runs from April 6 – September 12, 2010. I wrote wall text on the collages featuring Vietnamese and Korean war orphans.
The exhibition received great reviews: Art Daily
In February I was invited to give two lectures in New York: “In the Henry Darger Archive: From Rebellious Transsexual Child Slaves in Oz to Korean and Vietnamese Orphans” at Observatory in Brooklyn, and “Transsexual and White Slave Fantasies: Henry Darger’s Intertextualization” for the New York City Outsider Art Fair’s Nathan Lerner Annual Lecture.
For more information about me, please click on the links at the top. The links to the right are sites I recommend.