Intimacies on Stolen Land: Asian Americanist Reading, Media, and Empire

Intimacies on Stolen Land takes up “intimacy” not only as closeness—friends, family, everyday relations—but also as a way of tracing the unequal ties that bind empire, slavery, indenture, migration, and liberal modernity. Following Lowe’s interdisciplinary scholarship in race, empire, and global comparative humanities, graduate students from the College of Arts and Humanities will think with intimacy as a reading practice across Asian American and Asian diasporic texts, media, archives, and cultural sites. Four graduate presenters—Estella Jiang, Alice Bi, Tapaswinee Mitra, and Anne Tzi Jie Rong— will share works-in-progress, followed by responses and conversation with faculty respondents Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Neel Ahuja, Chad Infante, and Bayley Marquez.

Alice Bi is a doctoral student in the Department of English and a research assistant at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Her interests include small language models, experimental literary forms, and contemporary literature.

Estella Manzhu Jiang holds a BA in Women's Studies and Philosophy from Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, class, and decoloniality under transnational contexts, which she plans to pursue through interdisciplinary methods in cultural studies, archival studies, and feminist science and technology studies. Her proposed doctoral work will critically examine the aesthetical, political, and planetary conditions of sustaining digital infrastructure in the era of artificial intelligence.

Tapaswinee Mitra is a doctoral candidate the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMD. Their work examines settler colonialism, sovereignty, and land politics in South Asia, in contexts such as Kashmir and the Sunderbans, as well as in transnational religious movements like Khalistan. Their interdisciplinary research engages feminist visual culture, environmental justice, and critical theory to analyze differential sovereignties, representation, and the political imaginaries of resistance.

Anne Rong is a Master’s student at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in English and Political Philosophy at UMD in 2025, earning an honor’s citation for her undergraduate thesis on Gidra, widely considered the first panethnic Asian American periodical. Her current research focuses on the Asian American literary movement of the long 1960s, with an emphasis on student periodicals and little magazines.

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño & Cupeño) is an Indigenous feminist philosopher. Shelbi researches, teaches, and consults on Indigenous research and evaluation methods, cultural and language reclamation, Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous feminist interventions in critical social work, and land-based feminist coalition-building. Shelbi is fascinated by the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, caretaking, power, and trauma. Shelbi is a proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, and is of both Luiseño (Payómkawichum) and Cupeño (Kupangaxwichem) descent. She is Assistant Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab, a hub of Indigenous feminist research and evaluation.

Neel Ahuja is Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies. Neel teaches a variety of courses in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist science studies, disability studies, and environmental humanities. His research explores the relationship of the body to the geopolitical, environmental, and public health contexts of colonial governance, warfare, and security. Neel is the author of two books, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (2021).

Chad B. Infante is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland College Park. Chad earned his doctorate in English from Northwestern University in 2018. He is originally from Jamaica and studies Black, Indigenous US, and Caribbean literatures, film, and cultures. His publications include “Colonial Metaphor, Colonial Metaphysics: On the Poetic Pairing of Blackness and Indianness” in Diacritics and “Colonial Etiology: Globalism and the Debate Between Black and Native American Studies” with American Indian Quarterly. His forthcoming book Murderous Feeling: Gender and Retribution in Black and Indigenous Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) explores representations of anticolonial murder, vengeance, and revenge in Black and Indigenous literature and art as a philosophical response to colonial violence, as a way to read Black and Native literature together, and as a desire for a feminist and queer rendition of revolution.

Bayley J. Marquez is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies, and affiliate faculty with the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Consortium for Race Gender and Ethnicity. An Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, she acknowledges that her work and scholarship take place on Piscataway land, former plantation land, and within a land grant university funded by the seizure and sale of Indigenous lands. With a focus on space, land, material relations, and schooling, this acknowledgement is necessary to position her work within the structure of settler colonialism and her own lived experiences. Her research interests include settler colonial theory, Indigenous education, Black education, the history of education, abolitionist university studies, and critical ethnic studies. Her academic work is positioned at the intersection of settlement, antiblackness, imperialism and other instantiations of racialized and colonial power.

Organised by Ann Alex (doctoral candidate, the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies) and Edlie Wong (Professor, Department of English). This workshop has been made possible through the 2024-25 Harmony Fellowship Grant awarded to Ann Alex and Grace Dahye Kwon (doctoral candidate, American Studies), with generous support from the College of Arts & Humanities; the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Department of American Studies; the Department of Communication, and the Department of History at the University of Maryland-College Park.