John R. Eperjesi

For most of my career, I have been interested in the intersection of space, culture, and power. This interest has led me to a wide variety of spaces – oceans, islands, regions, POW camps, military bases – which became historically specific, contested places in the context of US expansion in Asia and the Pacific. Postcolonial ecocriticism has helped me theorize the spatial politics of a wide variety of cultural forms – novels, short stories, poems, documentaries, music, and film. In order to map the histories and geopolitics of US expansion in Asia and the Pacifc, my work travels across American Studies, Asian American Studies, Transpacific Studies, and Korean Studies.

After receiving my PhD in Literary and Cultural Theory from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000, I published my first book, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (UP of New England 2005). The book is a study of Orientalism in US culture with a focus on the 1890s, the period in which the US began to build a Pacific Empire by colonizing Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa. During this period, Asia and the Pacific were imagined as forming a unified region, a capitalist utopia that hoped to solve the economic crises of overproduction and class conflict that were shocking the country.

My current research is on climate fiction and debates over the question of the Anthropocene. What role can the study of literature play in addressing the climate emergency? There is no easy answer to this question, but any meaningful answer must involve dialogue between the humanities and sciences, and between academia and the public sphere.  

My work has appeared in: Amerasia, Asian Studies Review, boundary 2, The Contemporary Pacific, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Journal of American Studies, Korea Journal, Minnesota Review, and Pacific Historical Review.