Department of Comparative Literature

My main area of research and teaching centers on tensions between tradition and modernity as expressed in transnational performance, literature, and other arts. I am especially interested in the productive boundary between text, embodiment, material culture, and visual representation as investigated through an ethnographic lens. I focus on Indonesia and Southeast Asia from a global perspective, especially interrogating dynamics between the so-called East and West.

I have received many grants and fellowships for my performance work and research on Asian performance, including a Fulbright Fellowship to Indonesia and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As a theatre director and puppet artist I have worked nationally and internationally.

My first two books -- Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identity in Southeast Asia (2018) focus on puppetry – one of the oldest and most dynamic performances in Southeast Asia.

Currently, I am working on several projects applying interdisciplinary perspectives from literary and performance studies to explore relationships between women’s creative expression and embodied practices with power, culture, and identity within the spheres of tradition and modernity.

The first is a book tentatively titled Trespassing: The Subversive Travel of Indonesian Women in Literature and Performance. In this book I seek to understand how Indonesian women authors and artists rebel against boundaries of home and nation to declare agency within their creative work and lives. I rethink how the popular literary genre of travel writing provides Indonesian women with a unique form of freedom—an opportunity to trespass beyond the boundaries imposed by the state and society, defying prescribed roles and expectations. My readings of literature, performance, and film are informed by ethnography and the embodied experiences of dance, puppetry, and travel.

The second book project examines the lives and work of numerous Americans and Europeans who traveled to Indonesia, especially the island of Bali. I look at their work and lives through the lens of intercultural performance theory in order to trouble the Western hegemonic dynamic generally associated with intercultural performance by drawing on recent theories of global Asia(s).