University of California, Santa Barbara
People Faculty
Faculty

Heidi Amin-Hong

Assistant Professor

Heidi Amin-Hong
  • Office:
    SH 2720
  • Fax:
    (805) 893-4622
  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
  • Education:
  • Ph.D., University of Southern California

Heidi Amin-Hong is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching explore Asian American and Pacific Islander cultures shaped by US imperialism and militarism, uneven global capitalist development, and environmental transformation. Analyzing cultural narratives of war, displacement, and climate change, she interrogates ecological collapse as the material legacy of multiple forms of empire, militarism, and global capitalism in the US, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.

Her current book project, “Transpacific Contaminations: Ecological Aesthetics and Cold War Afterlives,” reimagines the Cold War’s environmental legacies through Asian American and Pacific Islander aesthetic interventions. Although the destructive role of US warfare on Asian and Pacific environments is well known, this project examines war’s impact on spaces peripheral to the battlefield that still shape transpacific ecologies, such as economic zones and ecological sanctuaries created on demilitarized zones and Indigenous lands. Analyzing literary and visual narratives of contamination against Cold War ideologies of containment, this project argues that Asian Pacific diasporic writers and artists developed aesthetic forms that highlight the entanglement of human and nonhuman histories. In doing so, they restore ecological relations and imagine a demilitarized future that depends on coalitions across borders and species.

Her writing has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, and the Asian American Literary Review, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

Research Areas

  • American Literature
  • American Race and Ethnic Studies
  • Asian American and/or Transpacific Literatures
  • Environment and Ecocriticism
  • Indigenous and/or Decolonial Studies
  • Postcolonial, Migration, and/or Diaspora Studies
  • Science and Technology Studies

Research Center Affiliations

Heidi Amin-Hong
  • Office:
    SH 2720
  • Fax:
    (805) 893-4622
  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

Heidi Amin-Hong's Bookshelf

Courses Taught

People