Dr. Attewell works at the intersection of human geography, American studies, and Asian diaspora studies to map the transnational geographies of US empire-building from the Cold War into the present. His work seeks to better understand how the US has combined military, development, and capitalist interventions to pacify colonized subjects across Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East.

Thus far, Dr. Attewell’s research agenda has focused on the two moments of militarized empire-building that have come to define the long American century. His first book, The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, is forthcoming in Spring 2023 from the University of Minnesota Press. It has been reviewed as a rich account of how the US transformed post-1945 Afghanistan into a key site for reimagining development into a liberal form of counterinsurgency. Since 2017, however, Dr. Attewell has also been working on a second book, tentatively titled The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in the Decolonizing Pacific. It maps the transpacific logistics infrastructures and the racialized labour regimes that the US assembled to supply its race war in Vietnam. Over time, Dr. Attewell has come to see Afghanistan and Vietnam not as siloed theatres of empire-building, but rather, as interconnected frontiers of the US’ long war against global moments for decolonization. Such connections across space and time are enabled through the everyday workings of the US military-industrial-development complex, which produces various geographical formations – such as logistics cities, model villages, and camptowns – as a way of expressing and reproducing its pwer across the decolonizing world.

At HKU, Dr. Attewell will teach courses in political and urban geography on topics ranging from infrastructure, geopolitical economy, imperialism, colonialism, militarization, migration, labour, sub/urban development, and diasporic place-making. He is interested in supervising capstone projects on transpacific infrastructures, diasporic (sub)urbanisms, the geographies of militarism, and the logistical life of global Asia.