Catherine H. Nguyen a lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard University.  Her research is in and at the intersections of Asian American, transpacific, postcolonial, and critical refugee studies.  She is currently working on her book manuscript Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War: Vietnamese Diasporic Contestations of Empire and Race that traces the long history of Western humanitarian intervention in Vietnam by an examination of legislation that addresses Vietnamese mixed-race children and citizenship and of literary representation of mixed-race children as transnational and transracial adoptees.  Her comparative and interdisciplinary research critiques how the Vietnamese mixed-race child turned transnational adoptee is the object upon which the rhetoric of humanitarian aid and the discourse of hospitality attempt to recuperate the loss of empire and military loss by way of family building as nation building.  More broadly, Catherine's research focuses on Vietnamese diasporic literature and Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, including graphic novels and film, and her work includes literature written in English and French.

Catherine has taught undergraduate courses on immigration and refugees from the Enlightenment to the 21st century, representations of medicine and race in fiction, and global graphic novels, among other classes.  As Lecturer on History & Literature, Catherine teaches seminars on Asian American graphic novels and on empire and postcolonial literatures as well as directs year-long junior and senior tutorials for students in the History & Literature fields of Ethnic Studies, American Studies, European Studies, and Modern World.