In both my teaching and research, I am interested in contemporary works--primarily but not exclusively written in the U.S.--that challenge genre boundaries, and that engage issues in feminist theory, ethnic studies, and cultural studies. Courses that I have taught explore topics including: the contemporary detective novel; women writers and multiculturalism; contemporary autobiography; memoir and disability; gender and sexuality; love and terror; american literary history; contemporary literary theory; education and culture; multi-genre women's literature; and contemporary minority literature.

Recent work includes the co-editing, with my colleague Laura Lyons, of a special issue of Biography, "Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing" (winter 2004). In that issue appears our introduction, "Bodies of Evidence and the Intricate Machines of Untruth," and our interviews with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Haunani-Kay Trask. I also have collaborated with Laura Lyons on an article entitled "Remixing Hybridity: Globalization, Native Resistance, and Cultural Production in Hawai'i,” which is part of the fall 2004 issue of American Studies; an abridged version in Italian appears in Acoma.

I am completing a book-length manuscript, Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today. An article on David Mura's Turning Japanese excerpted from that project was published in the journal LIT; another entitled "Recollecting This Bridge in an Anti-Affirmative Action Era" appears in Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating's This Bridge We Call Home (Routledge 2002).
My first book, Writing Women's Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies, was published in 1997 with the University of Wisconsin Press. After co-chairing the first international MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S.) Conference with Ruth Hsu in 1997, we co-edited two volumes emerging from that conference, Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Pacific, and Re-Placing American Literature: Conversations and Contestations. Other essays and review articles appear in the journals MELUS, American Quarterly, Hitting Critical Mass, The Contemporary Pacific, and Biography.

I have served as Director of the Honors Program in English and on the International Cultural Studies Program Steering Committee, and I have been active in campus-wide organizations including the University Peace Initiative and PO'E. I am currently serving as co-editor of the journal Biography with Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.