Linh Thuy Nguyễn specializes in Asian American and Southeast Asian American cultural studies, immigration and refugee studies and US militarism and race. She completed her PhD at the University of California, San Diego in the department of Ethnic Studies. Her research explores the interpersonal and structural relationships between history, memory, race, war, migration and family. She is passionate about community engagement on issues of immigration and refugees and has worked with local organizations develop community engagement and social justice pedagogy.
Research/Teaching Areas: Asian American Studies; Critical Refugee Studies; Culture; Feminism and Feminist Theory; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; History and Memory; Immigration; Race and Ethnicity; Southeast Asian American Studies; Violence and Trauma.
Current Projects: Engaging a cultural studies analysis of the sociological and literary as competing knowledge projects, I center the family as a site of mediation to analyze the affective and imagined experiences of family dynamics. I argue that the effects of assimilation as narrative of racial progress can be traced in second-generation cultural texts which grapple with the intimate impacts of the Vietnam War on refugees and their children, impacts which are erased through discourses of integration and resettlement. I develop a theory of intergenerational memory as a relational practice which focuses on affective experiences wherein the children of refugees connect their daily experiences as racial minorities in the United States with their parents’ pasts to recognize the shared experience of living under the material conditions of ongoing white supremacy, war and racism.
My next project explores the relationship between Vietnamese refugees, as the most over documented (refugee / immigrant) population in the United States and Central American migration as an un(der)documented phenomenon and the role that social science and policy has had in normalizing these characterizations of each group.
