The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title: The Culinary Unconscious: Representing Asian America in a Global Age

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. He specializes in critical refugee studies, diasporic Vietnamese literature, World Literature, theories of food and eating, and Asian American studies.
His first book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, investigates why a number of Southeast Asian American authors have recently embraced the refugee identity as a transformative position. Arguing that aesthetics should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, he shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending upon how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.

He has co-edited a special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies, titled, "Vietnam, War, and the Global Imagination.” Other recent publications have appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Canadian Literature, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.; The Journal of Commonwealth Literature; and Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. His research has been supported by the Faculty Fellows Program at the Humanities Institute at Stony
Brook University, as well as the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asian Consortium Publishing Grant. Since 2000 he has served as the Co-Chair of the Circle for Asian American Studies (CAALS), a national and international scholarly society devoted to the study of Asian American literature, culture, and arts.