Education
Ph.D., English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
International Cultural Studies Graduate Certification, East-West Center, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
M.A., Cultural Studies in Asia/Pacific, English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
B.A., English Language and Literature, University of Washington
Biography
Cheryl Narumi Naruse (nah-roo-seh) is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures, diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultural histories of capitalism, and genre studies. Recent courses she has taught include "The Cold War: or the Hot Wars in Asia," "Asian American Young Adult Fiction," “Literatures of Tourism,” “Race, Empires, and Asian America,” "Global Theories of Asian Racialization," “Asian Diasporic Literature,” “Love and Capitalism,” “Postcolonial and Diasporic Southeast Asian Literature,” “Literary Investigations,” and “Postcolonial Theory.” She has won both undergraduate and graduate teaching awards.
Naruse’s first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore (UC Press, 2023), analyzes the dynamics of Global Asia—an alluring location ideal for economic flourishing—in the context of Singapore’s cultural history of “postcolonial capitalism.” In doing so, it offers new conceptual paradigms for understanding postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and empire. In 2025, Becoming Global Asia won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literary Studies. Her other projects include a co-edited volume with Joanne Leow and Faris Joraimi, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore, a subversive travel guide that undoes the touristic fantasy of Singapore as a glossy, highly modernized playground for the rich. She is also at work on a second monograph that takes Singapore/Malaysia, the comparatively “cold” Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam War, as the basis for rethinking methodological assumptions in Asian American and postcolonial studies.
Naruse’s publications include articles in biography, Genre, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias as well as chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics and Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts. She has also co-edited a number of special issues: "Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism" for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature; a Periscope dossier “Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics and Alternative Globalities” for Social Text Online; and "Singapore at 50: At the Intersections of Neoliberal Globalization and Postcoloniality" for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Naruse earned her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with a certificate in International Cultural Studies from the East-West Center. She was the Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University (2024-25) and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2015-16). For the MLA, Naruse served as the inaugural chair of the Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Diasporic Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Forum (2018-19). She also chaired the MLA Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (2018-19). She currently serves as a regional representative on the executive board of the Association for Asian American Studies.