ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Keva X. Bui (they/them) is a scholar of war and US empire, science and technology, and anti-war social movements with specific focus on the US Cold War in Asia and the Pacific. They received a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a certificate in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego. At Northwestern, they teach courses on Asian American history; race, science, and technology; and the military-industrial complex.

 

Their current book project, Disarming Empire: Race and Anti-War Critique in US Cold War Weapons Culture, is a historical and cultural analysis of US Cold War research and development of weapons of mass destruction as shaped by race and war in Asia. Entangled infrastructures of racism, science, and imperialism have only deepened a society constantly proliferated with war and genocide engineered by “new” innovations that only promise further catastrophe. Drawing from military science archives, anti-war movement ephemera, and post-war cultural production, Disarming Empire traces the development of these infrastructures through the Cold War to the present and develops an anti-war and abolitionist critique of the world of war we find ourselves mired within.

Bui’s writing appears/is forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and the Sage Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies. They are currently at work on several other projects: 1) an examination of the Cold War legacies of international schools in Asia, with specific focus on the enduring presences of US militarism in Taiwan, 2) a co-authored essay with Heidi Amin-Hong on diasporic, artistic, and community practices of ecological memory in the wake of the Vietnam War, and 3) a special section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience titled “Racial Matters of Asian/America,” co-edited with Natalia Duong.