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, Spectral Diasporic Engagements: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Forging Burma/Myanmar Abroad, analyzes feminine and feminized figures in English-language media discourses who are perceived to represent and translate  the human rights crises in Burma/Myanmar to the Anglophone world. She argues that such discourses constitute a transnational gaze that desires  authentic Burmese-ness, a gaze she roots at the intersection of two Cold War legacies: the ethnonationalism of dictatorship in the Global South and the liberal nationalism of democracy in the Global North. Between these legacies, the aforementioned figures become suspended and Burmese-ness is rendered spectral, both absent and present, for Burma/Myanmar’s diaspora.

Rather than reduce these figures to their prescribed feminized roles as translators and symbols for a nation and its turmoil, she resituates them as part of global feminist, queer and trans diasporic cultures. Her project examines how these cultures engage such spectrality via biographical and autobiographical registers, navigating and experimenting with tropes of woman-as-nation and woman “finding her voice” against tyranny in the so-called developing world.