Paul Nadal

Position
Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Role
Executive Committee, Program in Media and Modernity
Title
Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptor, Center for Human Values, 2023-2026
Office Phone
Office
McCosh Hall, Room B29
Education
  • Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Bio/Description

Paul Nadal is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature and economy, with a particular focus on Asian American and Philippine Anglophone literature. Reading across literary and economic history, he brings archival research to the study of the novel, developing a multiscalar reading practice that elaborates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the works themselves.

Nadal brings these research interests together in his current book project, Remittances, Literary and Economic, which develops the first sustained inquiry into the convergence between novels and remittances, or the money that migrant workers send home. Theorizing remittances not only as currency but as a heuristic for reading intersecting circulations of literature, people, ideas, and value, the book uncovers the surprising role that English-language literature played in the twentieth-century transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest labor export economies. It argues that an important precursor to the migrant worker was the overseas writer, whose narratives of return envisaged remittances as comprising forms of labor that are part of, but remain irreducible to, market calculations of social life. His second project extends his ongoing interest in Marxist aesthetic theory and literary and economic history through a dual study of neoliberalism’s racial forms and Asian American literary emergence, tracing today’s digitally-driven knowledge economy to Cold War-era debates about race, family, time, and neoliberal human capital formation.

Nadal’s article, “Cold War Remittance Economy: US Creative Writing and the Importation of New Criticism into the Philippines," published in American Quarterly 73.3 (2021), was awarded the 1921 Best Essay Prize from the American Literature Society for “the best article in any field of American literature.” He has also published on the rise of literary realism in the Filipino Novel in English (“A Literary Remittance,” American Literature 89.3), the racial underpinnings of human capital theory (“How Neoliberalism Remade the Model Minority Myth,” Representations 163), and the transpacific radicalism of Carlos Bulosan (“Carlos Bulosan, Socialist?” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9.1). An article on logistics and Asian American literature is forthcoming.

Nadal earned his Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a dissertation fellow at the Institute of International Studies under the direction of Colleen Lye and Judith Butler. In 2017-18, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wellesley College. At Princeton, Paul Nadal is jointly appointed in English and American Studies and serves as an executive committee member of the Program in Media and Modernity at the School of Architecture. His courses include “Asian American Literature,” “Global Novel,” and “World as Scale.” He also teaches graduate seminars on racial capitalism and Marxist aesthetic theory; these seminars aim to introduce PhD students to historical materialist methods for writing about the economic mediations of culture. He is a faculty advisor for the Scholars Institute Fellowship Program (SIFP), Princeton’s mentorship program for first-generation and low-income students.