Dr. Emilia "Emi" Sawada is a queer, feminist, and decolonial scholar of critical ethnic studies and visual studies. In her research, she considers twentieth and twenty-first-century visual, literary, and performance practices that emerge from the historical intimacies of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, attending to questions of maternity, visuality, and presence. In her current project on ghost mothers, she retheorizes the extractive, genocidal violences of empire by exploring the clairvoyant aesthetic interventions of contemporary artists in California. She also has interests in cartography, childhood, madness, dreams, and erotics.

Before joining the Asian American Studies faculty, Dr. Sawada was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her published writing appears in Journal of Visual Culture and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.