Emi Sawada

Dr. Emilia "Emi" Sawada is a scholar of critical ethnic studies, transnational and decolonial feminisms, 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 book project on ghost mothers, Dr. Sawada employs queer critique to reconsider decolonial feminist ontologies of the human; she also develops an alternative visual methodology informed by theories of the sacred. Dr. Sawada has additional interests in cartography, erotics, madness, sexual violence, and intimate partner 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.