Naomi Paik

A. Naomi Paik is Assistant Professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  She earned her Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University and held the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Her research and teaching interests include Asian American and comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialisms; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational feminism; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.Her manuscript, Rightlessness:Testimonies from the Camp in Narratives of U.S. Culture and Law, reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps in a comparative study of Japanese American internees, HIV positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo in the 1990s, and “enemy combatants” currently imprisoned at Guantánamo.