Nadine Attewell

Education

PhD, English Literature, Cornell University (2006)
MA, English Literature, Cornell University (2003)
BA Honours, English and History, University of Toronto (2000)

Biography

Between 2000 and 2020, I studied and worked in English departments across the United States and Canada, including Cornell University, Macalester College, the University of Nevada at Reno, and McMaster University. In 2021, I returned to the Lower Mainland, where I was born and grew up (on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm land/in Richmond), to teach at SFU in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies as well as the Global Asia Program. 

As a scholar of empire, reproductive labour, and Asian and Asian diasporic life, my work is feminist, queer, anticolonial, and antiracist in methodology and orientation, and informed by my positioning as a second-generation settler of Chinese descent. My SSHRC-funded first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, investigates the centrality of reproduction to postimperial projects of governance and nation-building through readings of twentieth-century literature and policy from Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014. Focusing on Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule, my SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949, will appear with Stanford University Press in July 2026. Here, I delve into the heterogeneous social worlds that flourished in port cities like Hong Kong, London, and Liverpool during the first half of the twentieth century, developing vivid accounts of port city life pieced together from a range of archival materials, including photography, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, that testify to the reach and limits of empire as a structure of meaning. As Archives of Intimacy heads to press, I have begun work on a new book project that explores twentieth-century histories of dance as a practice of Chinese diasporic meaning-making for, against, and beyond (post)colonial, revolutionary socialist, anti-migrant, and anti-leftist projects of transformation and governance.

In my scholarship and teaching, I engage with a diverse array of texts and methods. Recently, however, I have been especially drawn to photographs as entry points of enquiry. Thus, for example, I’m working on a collaborative book project with my geographer sibling Wesley Attewell. Entitled Cold War Relations, the book turns to the vernacular photographic archives of American Vietnam War workers to explore Asian women’s wartime domestic, clerical, entertainment, and sex work across decolonizing southeast Asia. Between 2016 - 2019, I participated in the SSHRC-funded Family Camera Network; and currently serve on the editorial boards of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Trans Asia Photography. 

Recent Publications

• Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949. Stanford University Press, 2026.
• “Modernism and the Queer Theory of Diaspora.” Contemporary Queer Modernism, edited by Melanie Micir, Routledge, 2025.
• “Looking With Images: Chinese Diasporic Worldmaking Beyond the Frame.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus “Visualities,” Volume 8, Cycle 1 (2024).
• “Decolonizing Across Borders: Diasporic-Indigenous Encounters and the Predicaments of Arrival.” Diaspora and Literary Studies, edited by Angela Naimou, 346-360. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
• “Hong Kong in Transition: Photography and Liberation at the End of the Pacific War.” Trans Asia Photography 13, no. 1 (2023).
• “Conversation, Collaboration, and the Work of Teaching Global Asia/s” (with Anushay Malik). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9, no. 1 (2023): 3-14.
• “Exit Survey: The Terrain of Struggle.” English Studies in Canada 46, no. 1 (March 2020 [published 2022]): 13-21.
• “(Un)Learning at the Edge of Empires.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 1 (2022): 82-88.
• “Sweating For Their pay’: Gender, Labor, and Photography Across the Decolonizing Pacific” (with Wesley Attewell). Journal of Asian American Studies 24, no. 2 (2021): 183-217.
• “Refocusing the Gaze: Leisure, Power, and Women’s Work in Interwar Hong Kong.” Visualizing China blog, August 2021.
• “Between Asia and Empire: Infrastructures of Encounter in the Archive of War” (with Wesley Attewell). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2019): 162-179.
• “Local Knowledge: Of Homecomings and Orientations.” BC Studies 198 (Summer 2018): 25-26.
• “Intimacy Out of Doors: Labor, Landscape, and Chinese Diasporic Practices of Looking.” In Photography and Migration, edited by Tanya Sheehan. Routledge, 2018.
• “Looking in Stereo: School Photography, Interracial Intimacy, and the Pulse of the Archive.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 4, no. 1-4 (2018): 19-44.
• “Not the Asian You Had in Mind: Race, Precarity, and Academic Labor.” English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (2016): 183-190.
• “The Return of the Native: White Supremacy, Indigenous Rights, and the Struggle for Britain.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 35 (2016): 173-197.
• “Loving Revolutions: Reading Mixed Race at Mid-Century.” In Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights, edited by Allan Hepburn. McGill University Press, 2016.
• “‘For Karnak 1923/From London 1942’: Approaching War in H. D.’s The Walls Do Not Fall.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature vol. 34, no. 2 (2016): 1-27.
• Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. University of Toronto Press, 2014.