Christina Yi

Christina Yi




Assistant Professor
Department of Asian Studies

Email: christina.yi@ubc.ca

I recently completed my Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature at Columbia University. My dissertation, entitled “Fissured Languages of Empire: Gender, Ethnicity, and Literature in Japan and Korea, 1930s–1950s,” investigates how Japanese-language literature by Korean writers both emerged out of and stood in opposition to discourses of national language, literature, and identity. In the dissertation, I first examine the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reassessing the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these texts. I then trace how postwar reconstructions of ethnic nationality gave rise to the specific genre of zainichi (lit. “residing in Japan”) literature. Included in my analyses is a consideration of literature written by Japanese writers in (and/or writing about) Korea, and the role literary criticism has played in actively shaping national canons.

Throughout my life, I have often been struck by how language – or the unexpected use of it – can disrupt set notions of ethnicity and nationhood. This awareness shaped itself into a B.A. in Japanese Language and Literature from the University of Virginia (with the encouragement of Stefania Burk, who was teaching there at the time!), capped by a senior thesis in which I translated Yi Yang-ji’s 1989 novella Yuhi. Shortly after college, I spent two years working in Japan on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme. In my capacity as a Coordinator for International Relations at Hamamatsu City Hall, I had the opportunity to translate a remarkably diverse range of materials, everything from mayoral speeches to tourist pamphlets, Noh play summaries to medical vaccination guides.

As the title of my dissertation might suggest, my current research takes advantage of all my prior interests in its focus on postcolonialism and gender. In the future I hope to expand the scale of my project to include a consideration of how the Japanese language facilitated the movement of texts in other contexts, for example among so-called “canonical” writers traveling from the metropole to the peripheries and between the peripheries themselves.

The last time I came to Vancouver, a friendly taxi driver pointed out that I have a persistent connection to the word “Columbia” – I was born and raised in the suburbs of the District of Columbia; I went to graduate school at Columbia University; and now I’ll be working in British Columbia. A strange connection, but also a very welcome one! I am excited to join such a great community of scholars in the beautiful city of Vancouver, and I look forward to contributing to the program in my turn.

Danielle Wong




Assistant Professor
Department of English Language and Literatures

Email: danielle.wong@ubc.ca

Danielle Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Prior to joining UBC’s English Department, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests focus on historical and contemporary relationships between race, gender, sexuality, labour, migration, Empire, and “new” technologies. Her book project, tentatively titled Inorganic Asian North American Lives, analyzes Asian North American new media productions and performances of inorganicity by tracing a genealogy of cultural discourses that figure Asianness as a virtuality and a form of mediation.

Adheesh Sathaye




Associate Professor
Department of Asian Studies

Email: adheesh.sathaye@ubc.ca

Major research interests:

Currently researching early medieval Sanskrit drama, aesthetics, and narrative literature. Doctoral research involved the Sanskrit epics, Marathi devotional performance traditions, and theories of textual production, performance, and folkloristics. Other interests include South Asian folklore, narrative theory, and cultural studies.

Education

M. A. and Ph. D. in South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Christopher B. Patterson




Associated Professor
Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

Email: c.patterson@ubc.ca

Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on transpacific discourses of literature, games, and films through the lens of empire studies, queer theory and creative writing. He is the author of the academic books, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020). He writes fiction under the pseudonym Kawika Guillermo, and is the author of Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press, 2018), and the queer speculative novel All Flowers Bloom (Westphalia Press, 2020).

Anne Murphy




Associate Professor
Department of History

Email: anne.murphy@ubc.ca

Anne Murphy is Associate Professor and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature, and Sikh Studies at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Religion and her Master’s degree in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington. She previously taught in the Religious Studies and Historical Studies Concentrations at The New School in New York City.

Renisa Mawani



Associate Professor,
Department of Sociology

Acting Associate Dean, Equity, Innovation, and Strategy
Faculty of Arts

Email: renisa@mail.ubc.ca

Research Areas

Colonial Legal History; Critical Theory, Race and Racism; Affect; Time and Temporality; Oceans and Maritime Worlds; Settler Colonialism and Migration; Colonial India and the Diaspora; More-than-human Worlds

Research Interests

My research is organized along two trajectories.

The first meets at the interface of critical theory and legal history. To date, my work has aimed to write histories of colonial dispossession aimed at Indigenous peoples and restrictions imposed on “Asiatic” migration (from China and India, in particular) as conjoined and entangled colonial legal processes that are central to the politics of settler colonialism, historically and in the contemporary moment. My first book, Colonial Proximities (2009), details legal encounters between Indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, Europeans, and those enumerated as “mixed race” along Canada’s west coast. The book considers how state racisms were produced and mobilized through land, law, and labour in sites of colonial re-settlement and offers a critical engagement with Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics.

My second book, Across Oceans of Law (2018), traces the currents and counter-currents of British/ colonial law and Indian radicalism through the 1914 journey of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese owned steamship. The book draws on archival research conducted in Canada, India, and the U.K. It reorients the ship’s passage away from the optics of immigration, nationalism, and landfall that have been so persistent, towards a global and maritime legal history. By following this one ship through time and space, the book draws the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans into a single analytic frame, and in so doing, explores the entanglements between transatlantic slavery, efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waterways, Indian indenture, and “free” migration.

My current book project, Enemies of Empire: Commerce and Confinement in Colonial India, Burma, and Siam, 1914-1920, may be read as a sequel to Across Oceans of Law. Focused on the Ingress into India Ordinance and the Foreigners Ordinance, the book examines how colonial officials sought to redraw and control maritime and land-based borders between India, Burma, and Siam during the World War I period and beyond. In September 1914, as authorities anticipated the arrival of the Komagata Maru, Lord Hardinge, the Governor-General of India, signed the Ingress into India Ordinance which granted local police and magistrates unprecedented powers to arrest and detain Indian men returning from abroad. The ordinance was ostensibly aimed at so-called seditionists from Punjab but was used more widely, criminalizing merchants and traders in India, Burma, and Siam. To document the coercive effects of the Ingress, including the devastating consequences it had for families, I present a legal history through family biography. The protagonists of this story include four Muslim brothers from Gujarat who were living and working along the Burma-Siam border and seeking new economic opportunities beyond the impositions of caste. Under the auspices of war-time security, the Ingress granted colonial authorities the ability to criminalize trading families, thereby expanding the imperial carceral state and creating new “enemies of empire” in the process.

My second set of interests, “legalities of nature,” coalesce at the juncture of science, law, and history. I have written a series of articles on law and nature through parks and place. A central concern has been the ways in which colonial violence has been imposed and legitimized through racial, legal, civic, and state claims to nature, identity, and wilderness.

I have written a series of essays and articles exploring the legalities of nature the appropriation of holometabolous insects as labouring bodies in contemporary geopolitics. Focused on global food production, climate change, and forms of war, this project draws from anticolonial writings and postcolonial theory and places them into conversation with the philosophy of time, movement, and change in the work Henri Bergson.

Education
Ph.D., University of Toronto
Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto

Other Affiliations
Faculty Associate, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
Faculty Associate, Green College
Faculty Associate, Liu Institute for Global Issues

Siyuan Steven Liu




Professor
Department of Theatre and Film

Phone: 604–822–0944
Email: siyuan.liu@ubc.ca

SIYUAN LIU, Ph.D. (U. of Pittsburgh), specializes in Asian theatre. Since 2006, he has published eight peer-reviewed research articles on twentieth-century Chinese and Japanese theatre in Theatre Journal, TDR, Asian Theatre Journal, and Text & Presentation. He also has two research articles included in anthologies that are currently in press. His book reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Asian Theatre Journal, Text & Presentation, and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. He has contributed dozens of entries on twentieth-century Chinese theatre to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance and The Encyclopaedia of Asian Theatre. He has regularly presented research papers in conferences in North America and is the Member Outreach Coordinator for Association for Asian Performance. Currently he is working on several research projects. Before coming to UBC, he taught at the University of Georgia.

Laura Ishiguro




Associate Professor
Department of History

Director
Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies

Email: laura.ishiguro@ubc.ca

Dr. Laura Ishiguro is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies at UBC. She is also a Faculty Associate at UBC’s Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, and a Wilson Associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Broadly, she is an historian of settler colonialism, society, and everyday life in Canada, with a particular focus on the territories colonially known as British Columbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research has been published in a number of journal articles and book chapters, as well as her monograph, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2019). She is now primarily focused on reimagining how we might tell and teach histories of people of Asian descent in northern North America, with an emphasis on Nikkei or Japanese Canadian history-telling.

At UBC, she teaches courses on global empires, colonialism, and histories of Canada, including ACAM 300: Dis/orienting Asian Canada. She was awarded a Killam Teaching Prize in 2018.