Pembroke Center

Ashley Aye Aye Dun studies Asian American and global anglophone literatures and visual cultures. Her current manuscript, “Forging Burma in American Culture: Authenticity, Authoritarianism, and the Cold War Exception,” is situated at the crossroads of Asian American and Asian studies. The manuscript explores popular American cultural depictions of Burma/Myanmar and the literature of its diaspora to analyze the southeast Asian country’s “exceptional” status in Cold War scholarship. In doing so, her work seeks to critique dual Cold War legacies—the ethnonationalism of Burma/Myanmar’s military regime and the multicultural nationalism of American liberal democracy—as they intersect in academic spaces and dialogues seeking to extract gendered Burmese/Myanmar bodies for knowledge of “authentic Burmese-ness.” She holds a PhD in English from Brown University and an M.A. in English from New York University.

She is also at work on her first novel. Of the courses she has designed and taught, her favorites thus far have been “Asian America’s Abject Horrors,” “All of Them Witches: Race, Gender, and Witchcraft in Popular Culture,” and “Between Home and Haven: Contemporary Narratives of Revolt and Refuge.”