Takeo Rivera
Assistant Professor of English
- Title Assistant Professor of English
- Office ENG 443
- Email tekr@bu.edu
- Education BA, MA, Stanford University
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Takeo Rivera is assistant professor of English as a specialist in performance studies with a focus on race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. American cultural production. His current project, Model Minority Masochism, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is focused on masochism and techno-orientalism in Asian American cultural production across multiple media, including theater, literature, graphic novels, historical archives, and video games. This project explores the relationship between power and pleasure within the traumas of racialization, examining affective attachments to nonhuman, machine-like stereotypical forms. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Amerasia, Performance Research, and ASAP/Journal, as well as the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media anthology.
Dr. Rivera is also a playwright whose plays have been staged in New York City, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. His creative work explores race, masculinity, and sexuality at length. His play Goliath has been recognized by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest, and the Planet Connections Theater Festivity. He has also worked with Poetic Theater Productions, CompanyONE Theater and PlayGround San Francisco.
Dr. Rivera teaches courses in contemporary drama, modern drama, Asian American literature, queer theory, new media, and the literature and performance of people of color in the United States. He is also a member of the core faculty of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program, a member of the BU Faculty Gender & Sexuality Studies Group, affiliate of the African American Studies Program, and currently serves as the faculty mentor of the Asian Student Union. Dr. Rivera was also a 2019-2020 faculty fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. A publicly engaged scholar, Dr. Rivera has been interviewed for Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Wired, and Mic, among others, on a range of subjects regarding Asian American culture and politics.