Research Interests
Dr. Emilia "Emi" Sawada is a scholar of critical ethnic studies, transnational feminist cultural studies, queer of color critique, and visual culture. 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 has additional interests in cartography, erotics, madness, and sexual violence.
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.
Education
Ph.D., American Studies, New York University
Courses Taught
AAS 200 US Race and Empire
AAS 211 Asian Americans and the Arts
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies
Recent Publications
Sawada, E. (2024). Of Mothers and Mutants: Mario Acevedo Torero’s Queer Cartography of Loss. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 49(1), 13-46. https://doi.org/10.1525/azt.2024.49.1.13
Sawada, E. (2022). Review: R. Kapadia's Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. Journal of Visual Culture, 21(3), 520-523. https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221142494