Simon Fraser University | Department of English | Collaborator
| Research Areas: Transnational Asian Literary and Cultural Studies; Urban and Spatial Theory; Decolonization; Digital Humanities; Environmental Humanities |
Dr. Joanne Leow is an Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Leow, as a project collaborator, brings expertise in transnational Asian literary and cultural studies, urban and spatial theory, decolonization, digital humanities, and the environmental humanities. Leow has published in Canadian Literature, Trans Asia Photography Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, University of Toronto Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and elsewhere. She will be advising on the digital humanities component of “Racialized Ecologies in and Beyond Settler-Colonial Canada: Documentary, Speculative and Poetic Texts and Contexts” and contributing to the intellectual exchange and mentoring.
Selected Publications
Leow, Joanne. “Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore.” positions: asia critique, vol. 28 no. 4, 2020, p. 869-904.
Leow theorizes new forms of Asian topicalities in contemporary Singapore as a cultural movement of ecological construction predicated by cultivation and coloniality that are reflected through the analysis of the Gardens by the Bay ecodevelopment’s material space and contemporary literary texts by Kevin Kwan, Sandi Tan, and Ng Yi-Sheng.
Leow, Joanne. “Lost Islands, Future Islands: Reading Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour Relationally.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 89 no. 1, 2020, p. 145-162.
Leow reads Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour alongside Tekahionwake’s “The Lost Island” and Lee Maracle’s “Goodbye Snauq” to consider possible reconfigurations of Indigenous and diasporic kinship relations in the colonized spaces of unceded Coast Salish territories now known as Vancouver.
Leow, Joanne. “’this land was the sea’: The Intimacies and Ruins of Transnational Sand in Singapore.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 6 no. 2, 2020, p. 167-189.
Leow examines Singaporean artist Charles Lim’s SEA STATE project and Cambodian American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s film The Lost World in revealing the unseen consequences of Singapore’s urban development and argues that the works are in dialogue about the impact of the city-state’s rapid development.