Dr. Emilia (Emi) Sawada is a scholar of critical ethnic studies, visual studies, transnational feminist cultural studies, and queer of color critique. In her scholarship, 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 book project on ghost mothers, she theorizes the immaterial subjects of US empire by exploring the clairvoyant aesthetic practices of contemporary Asian American and Pacific Islander women artists in California. She also has additional interests in cartography, girlhood, and transnational adoption.

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.

She is an active member of Nikkei Uprising Chicago, an abolitionist collective that envisions a world without cops, camps, or cages.