Ashley Aye Aye Dun is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Office of Access and Institutional Excellence at Rice University. She holds a PhD in English and graduate certificate in gender and sexuality studies from Brown University.

Her book project, Forging Burma in American Culture: Authenticity, Authoritarianism, and the Cold War Exception, analyzes how literature by the diaspora of Burma (Myanmar) experimentally employs the autobiographical register in a manner that challenges the American gaze desiring “authentic Burmese-ness,” with the burden of authenticity falling heavier on feminized and queer bodies. Her project tracks this gaze across U.S. academia, journalism, and politics—arguing that it manifests at the intersections of two Cold War legacies: the ethnonationalism of Burma’s military regime and the multicultural nationalism of U.S. liberal democracy. Considering this gaze as part of a unique, gendered relation between Burma and U.S. empire, her project repositions Burma as being central to critical discourses on the Cold War and attends to the dearth of related work on Burma in Asian American and global Asias scholarship.