My first book, titled Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press), is scheduled to be released on October 8, 2024. A description of the book, and how to pre-order it, is available here and here.
I’m also currently working on essays toward a book manuscript on Asian American literature and Asian-Indigenous relationality in North America. The book is provisionally titled “The Intimacy of Others: Asian Settler Structures of Feeling.” The book tracks the character and unevenness of Asian American literary engagements with historically-specific forms of Asian exclusion and Native American disappearance and dependency. Framed in this way, salient Asian American studies concerns of the past four decades—among which the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture includes transnational and diasporic identities and communities, histories and dynamics of imperialism, and the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality—are inflected and transformed by a critical strategy of reading for moments where texts address the terms and logics of settler belonging and the settler state’s very existence on stolen land. “The Intimacy of Others” brings a formally-oriented Asian American literary studies approach into sustained dialogue with theoretical and scholarly work on histories and cultures of settler colonialism. The book seeks to stimulate further research in literary studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and gender, queer, and sexuality studies; in particular, I aim to stimulate further research into the ways literature, as a formal and semantic repository of shared and contested ideas and values, shapes and shifts our understanding of Asian Americans’ relationship to Indigenous people and the foundations of settler colonialism, including the workings of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.
My scholarship, on topics ranging from 19th-century US author Bret Harte and queer studies to settler colonialism and Asian American literature and visual art, has also been published in the journals Western American Literature and Settler Colonial Studies, and in a collection edited by Susan Bernardin of Oregon State University titled The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West.
Recent and forthcoming publications:
“Film and the Asian American as Doppelganger.” Forthcoming in essay collection on “Mirrors, Shadows, Simulations, and Other Uncanny Doubles,” edited by Pamela Bedore and Anita Duneer.
Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press, 2024)
“Genders and Sexualities Across the Asian North American West.” In Companion to Gender and the American West, edited by Susan Bernardin. New York: Routledge, 2022.
“The End(s) of Regeneration: Naturalist Frontier Chronotopes and the Time of US Settler Colonial Biopolitics.” Settler Colonial Studies 11, no. 1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2020.1809939.
Ryan Tan Wander 