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.

My book, Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today, is forthcoming in Spring 2009 with the University of Georgia Press. 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 American Quarterly, Biography, Hitting Critical Mass, Life Writing, LIT, MELUS, The Contemporary Pacific, and in Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating's This Bridge We Call Home.

Recent work also includes the co-editing, with my colleague Laura Lyons, of a special issue of Biography, "Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing." 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 articles entitled "Remixing Hybridity: Globalization, Native Resistance, and Cultural Production in Hawai'i" (in American Studies) and "From Grief to Grievance: Ethics and Politics in the Testimony of Anti-War Mothers" (forthcoming in Life Writing). We are currently working on an interview we conducted with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri.

I am co-editor of the journal Biography with Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes; am co- advisor for the Comparativism and Translation in Literary and Cultural Studies (CTLCS) Research Cluster; and am on the Coordinating Council for the Center on Disability Studies. I have served as Director of the Honors Program in English and on the International Cultural Studies Program Steering Committee, and have been active in campus-wide organizations including the University Peace Initiative and PO'E.

Education
BA, Stanford University
MA, PhD, University of California-Berkeley

Interests
Contemporary women's literature, ethnic U.S. literatures, life writing, disability studies, feminist theory, cultural studies

Awards
Frances Davis Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1998
Board of Regents' Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2007