Overview
(he/they pronouns)
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Performing and Media Arts where I am a performance theorist studying second-generation Cambodian American performance as memory work. The first generation of their families to be born in the United States, my demographic of Cambodian Americans must contend with the afterlives of migration, refugeehood, and genocide. Taking the limit of the archive and the repertoire in performance as my starting point, I apply performance theory, sound theory, theories of memory and trauma, and queer of color critique informed by critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, and disability/crip studies to understand how people make (meaning of) their worlds through performance. My sites of inquiry range from literature (particularly that of Anthony Veasna So’s), to music, to stage works, to film, to food, to land(mines), to name a few.
My article, “Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work” (American Music) forwards an idea of ethical listening and what my dissertation elaborates on what I call transgressive memory work—memory work which contends with refusal and erasure. It details an autoethnographic account of misremembering and learning with archival material from Khao I Dang, the refugee camp in Thailand to which my family fled, and my mother’s memories and personal effects. My forthcoming article, “Crafting Empathy, Speaking Solidarity” stems from community work with the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants (CERI) in Oakland, California which is a support center for all refugees and immigrants in the Bay Area, with a particular history with the local Cambodian population. It heeds the activisms and calls to action of elderly women—grandmothers, or yeays—who are clientele of the Center and listens to such calls using Nina Simone’s music to understand refugee solidarities and futurities.
I have presented my academic work at all stages of academic conferences from local to national to international, from open calls to dedicated themes and topics and invited talks in such entities as the American Studies Association, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, and the California Department of Education, among others. For the Department of Education, I served on a team of Cambodian American scholars to develop the Cambodian American Studies curriculum—the first curriculum of its kind. Dedicated to the bettering of graduate student life, I am a committee member of Project Spectrum whose mission is to both shift the large-scale culture of North American music academia toward equity by confronting racism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, settler-colonialism, and other forms of discrimination and injustice and to bolster community, share resources, and hold space for those academics who are marginalized by the academy.
My research has been supported by fellowships and grants from among others the American Society for Theatre Research, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Center for Khmer Studies; and at Cornell, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Southeast Asia Program, the American Studies Program, the Graduate School, the Society for the Humanities. For the 2024–2025 academic year, I am a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities.
Before pursuing my PhD at Cornell, I began a PhD at Rutgers in (ethno)musicology and prior to that earned both a dual M.Mus. in sacred music choral studies as well as American and public musicology and a B.Mus. in voice performance from Westminster Choir College. At Westminster, I was a member of the Westminster Symphonic Choir performing with such orchestras as the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, to name a few; and a member (and eventually assistant conductor) of the Westminster Williamson Voices which earned a Grammy nomination for best choral performance for our recording of James Whitbourn’s Annelies. Also with the Williamson Voices and in conjunction with the University of Oxford, I studied and served as chorister-in-residence, assistant conductor, and administrator at the Choral Institute at Oxford. I sang and conducted professionally in the New York metropolitan area before moving to Ithaca, most recently in the choir of Christ Church NYC (60th and Park Ave).
Research Focus
Society for the Humanities project on the focal theme "Silence"
Silence and Cambodian American Performance
My project addresses the silences following the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979) through its diaspora with an emphasis on the postmemory of the second-generation in the United States. I ask: How does a generation, which was born in the United States and removed from the histories and geographies which significantly shaped their lives, use performance as a means of understanding themselves? Performing what I call transgressive memory work—that is, memory work that contends with erasure, forgetting, and refusal—this generation’s performance must engage with silence and its (im)possible representations at the incommensurable nexus of both wealth and dearth of knowledge. In response to this generation’s transgressive memory work, I caution the second-generation’s yearning for knowing from their elders to speak out of silence, and argue that while silence as protection, silence as critique, silence as stuckness, and the plethora of silences Cambodians keep are critical to a Cambodian American futurity, so too, is grappling with silence as silence.
In this year at the Society, I will write dissertations chapters concerning a moment of clasped hands at the downbeat to a reprise rock concert and the intergenerational, creative work of a support center for refugees and immigrants to understand the conditions which create refugeehood and in turn, what refugees and their progeny create even if silent, or heard as silent. I read these performances as critical fabulations, to borrow from Saidiya Hartman, but extend the sources of her method and the ethical inquiry she makes by thinking through embodied knowledge of survivors still with us. Listening to such a silence takes a critical position whose stakes are revealed, I argue, in a Cambodian American critique.