Nozomi (Nakaganeku) Saito is a PhD Candidate in Cultural and Critical Studies with a concentration in literature. Before coming to the University of Pittsburgh, she received her BA in English from the University of Colorado and MA in English from Boston University. Her research interests include Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander literature, critical militarism studies, Third World Feminisms, Cold War studies, and Okinawa/Shimanchu culture and critique.
Her dissertation, ”Aftermaths of Empires: Cold War In/Securities in the Black Pacific,” examines the aftermaths of US wars and occupations and the emergence of Cold War securitization in the Asian-Pacific. She argues that the aftermaths of militarism and settler colonialism are sites of contested hegemony, where fictions of US benevolence are both produced and contested in literatures of the Black Pacific. She is an incoming 2022-2023 Ford Fellow and the recipient of fellowships, grants, and awards from the Mitsubishi Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Dr. and Mrs. Ryonosuke Shiono Nationality Rooms scholarship, the Asian Studies Center, and the 2019 Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award, among others. Her article, “Bone and Coral: Ossuopower and the Control of (Future) Remains in Occupied Okinawa” is forthcoming in the 2022 special issue of American Quarterly, From Anarchy to Chaos: Generation(s) of Empire. She also has a co-authored chapter in the anthology Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies, edited by Peter Moe and Stacey Waite.
Her creative non-fiction essays have been published in various journals and anthologies, most recently A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, edited by gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe. Her work also has been featured in the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities column at Asian American Writers Workshop, The Vassar Review, and Gidra. Besides scholarship and writing, she seeks to bridge Asian and Asian American communities through community organizing and engagement.