I am currently a doctoral student in the Department of Film & Media Studies at the University of California‚ Santa Barbara‚ where I study global film and television with a focus on Asia. Previously‚ I earned my Masters of Science at MIT in Comparative Media Studies under Henry Jenkins and William Urrichio. Before embarking on my career in media studies‚ I was on track to attend medical school. I earned a Masters of Public Health at Boston University and was later admitted to Penn State Hershey College of Medicine. I have‚ over time‚ found ways to combine my dual interests in both media and health‚ like working on ways to incentivize children to healthier lifestyles through mobile gaming.
Currently, my work in media studies focuses on issues of regionalism‚ post–colonial modernities‚ and textual imaginaries of the ‘Asian modern’ in contemporary East Asian film and television melodrama. As Asian media production centers become increasingly able to produce the image of itself for global distribution‚ the crafting of this imaginary of Asia becomes fraught with contradictory impulses and historical legacies that speak to the contested notion of modernity as it is expressed in post–colonial Asia. Among the questions that interest me are the textual interventions of fantasy, nostalgia and the generic norms of melodrama on this notion of the Asian modern in East Asian dramas. These explicit fantasies of an ambiguous‚ recent past/future encode in them concerns of time and the resonances of historical trauma on cultural memory. I am also intrigued by questions of poetics in globalization&sbquo especially notions of influence, aesthetics of national television in a networked age‚ and the poetics of the national as the nation ceases to be coterminous with state boundaries.
In my spare time‚ I am a writer of fantasy fiction, comic books, and video games. I enjoy knitting and other activities which require creative problem solving.