Ryan Ku specializes in Asian American and Southeast Asian literatures, with particular interest in war, empire, economy, sexuality, and narrative and broader interest in multiethnic American and Global South literatures (especially after World War II). Based on the premise that history’s workings beyond boundaries entail a transnational, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, he crosses geographic borders by centering minor subjects in his work to analyze the rewriting of history in literature. He obtained his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with a Critical Theory Certificate, from the University of California, Irvine and, before coming to Swarthmore, helped build the Asian American Studies Program at Duke University as its inaugural Postdoctoral Associate. Finishing his term in the Southeast Asian Forum (2020–2025) of the Modern Language Association, he is an incoming member of the Executive Committee of the Asian American Forum (2025–2030).

He is currently at work on two book projects. The first, War Reality: Novel Histories of Asia/America, uncovers alternate histories of the transpacific wars in Asian (American) novels. Bringing together multiethnic literature’s critique of national history with war writing’s deconstruction of objective reality, War Reality argues that national identity and ontological sense are intimately linked, and that therefore the rewriting of history entails an examination of (what passes for) reality. Rethinking Asian racialization in America as (social) war to synthesize it with U.S. (literal) wars in Asia, War Reality traces the “invisible” reality of Asian difference in America to the “forgotten” reality of America in Asia to interrogate the representation of reality in war. Embodying the realities created by representation for the purpose of war, Asians, War Reality finds, expand what reality means to reveal subaltern histories of U.S. wars in Asia and in America. Precisely in being racialized as not “real” Americans, Asians intimate the realities subsumed under the nation to take part in the wars (beyond and within) that make the nation. Rethinking fiction as an inscription (and not only an interpretation) of reality and war as a matter not only of how reality is seen (i.e., perspective) but of what is designated as real (i.e., ontology) to begin with, War Reality centers Asian–American entanglement to lay bare the histories repressed by the nation, indeed the narrative constitution of reality at war.

An expansion of his doctoral dissertation, the second monograph in progress, Imperial Wounds: Filipino/American Novels and Late Modernity, reads multiethnic American novels as postcolonial texts by reading them with Filipino novels. This integration of ethnic and area studies—a rereading of America through the “Filipino as method”—is based on the “structurally queer” position of the Filipino as a subject that, in not fitting into minority multiculturalism, points instead to U.S. empire history as a traumatic foundation of ethnicity in the nation. As in War Reality, the transpacific crossing performed by Imperial Wounds unravels the novel, known historically as the nation’s story, as a medium of disavowed histories to which the minor is the key.

Influenced by critical theory, Prof. Ku is wary of binary oppositions—categories essentialized because they have lost touch with their histories—cultivates “(con)textual analysis”—a critical practice attentive to story, discourse, and context—and takes reading as also an opportunity to philosophize—in particular, about language, knowledge, reality, power, temporality, and desire. As a teacher, he aims to let students explore the world through texts, thereby know the other and the self, share in the life of freedom fostered by the humanities through analytical reading, sound argumentation, and effective writing. At Swarthmore, he teaches courses eligible for multiple majors and minors—namely, (in reverse chronological order) Asian American War Literature, U.S. War Culture, Introduction to Literary Theory, Southeast Asian Literature in Translation, Global South Literature, U.S. Empire Literature, Southeast Asian Literature in English, Asian American Gender/Sexuality/Species, Alternate War Histories of Asia/America, and Asian American Literature and Culture.

Publications:

• “War by Mediation: The Doubling of Filipino–American History in Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto,” Contemporary Literature 64.3 (Fall 2023): 289–322, University of Wisconsin Press, https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.64.3.289 (Project Muse access).
• “Gina Apostol,” The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020, edited by Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen J. Burn, and Lesley Larkin, 2022, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119431732.ecaf0166.
• “Postcolonial Pharmakon: Traumatic Transmission in Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao,” Kritika Kultura 38 (2022): 195–231, Ateneo de Manila University, https://dx.doi.org/10.13185/KK2022.003810.
• “The Failure and Reality of Sublimation: Psychoanalytic Ontology and Revolution,” American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences 78.1 (Spring 2021): 79–103, Johns Hopkins University Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2021.0002.
• Review of Kendall A. Johnson’s The New Middle Kingdom: China and the Early American Romance of Free Trade (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Zhaoming Qian’s East-West Exchange and Late Modernism: Williams, Moore, Pound (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and Andrew C. McKevitt’s Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), American Literature 92.2 (June 2020): 387–390, Duke University Press, https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267864.