Kathryn Cai

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Graduate Student, English, UCLA

Kathryn Cai is a Ph.D. candidate in English at UCLA whose research explores connections between narratives of individual bodily states and broader sociopolitical and environmental conditions. Her interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century and Asian American literature, critical health humanities, environmental humanities, and disability studies. Her dissertation, “Affective Imaginations of Adaptation: Navigating Contingency in Contemporary Asian American and Chinese Narratives of the Body,” examines contemporary Asian American and Chinese popular narratives that formulate flattened affects through embodied practices as diverse possibilities for sensing, flexibly navigating, and obliquely refusing conditions across the U.S. and China shaped by China’s entry into the global economy.