Catherine H. Nguyen is a scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora and Asian American literature. She is a Fellow of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard 2021-2022 and the 2021 ACLS Fellowship Program. Catherine is currently an Assistant Professor in Asian Diasporic Literatures with the Writing, Literature & Publishing Department at Emerson College.
Catherine's research is in and at the intersections of Asian American, transpacific, postcolonial, and critical refugee studies. Her book project Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War: Vietnamese Diasporic Contestations of Empire and Race that investigates the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee as the figures through which the United States and France negotiate citizenship and refugee displacement and rewrite military loss in their histories of empire in Vietnam. It challenges the prevailing idea that constructs the mixed-race child as an object of rescue by employing the conceptual framework of hospitality to reveal the impossibility of their full incorporation through repatriation and adoption. Examining documentary films, memoirs, and literary works in French and English, the project explores how the mixed-race child as subject complicates the categories of refugee and adoptee and simultaneously undermines the expected gratitude with acts of hostility.
More broadly, Catherine's research and teaching interests include Asian American and Asian diasporic literatures, critical refugee studies, critical adoptee studies, and interrogations of empire and militarism, questions of form and figuration as well as graphic novels and visual culture written in English and French. Her essays have appeared in Adoption & Culture and in edited volumes on multiethnic graphic novels and on postmigratory Francophone literature.
Catherine is a member of the AAPI Covid-19 Project and the Asie du Sud Est Research Network (ASERN).
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
- Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Emerson College (2022- )
- Fellow, ACLS Fellowship Program '21, American Council of Learned Societies (2022-2023)
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, Harvard University (2021-2022)
- Lecturer, Committee on the Degrees of History and Literature, Harvard University (2018-2021)
EDUCATION
- PhD, Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
- Masters de Recherche, Littérature comparée, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Vietnamese diasporic literatures
- Asian American Studies
- Critiques of the Vietnam War, U.S. empire, and militarism
- Operation Babylift and Critical Adoption Studies
- Critical Refugee Studies
- French imperialism, Francophone literature, and Indochine
- Graphic novels and visual culture
Catherine teaches literature courses that range from immigration and world literature to Asian American literature and the Vietnamese diaspora. She 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 a Lecturer on History & Literature, Catherine taught seminars on Asian American literature, Asian diasporic graphic novels, and literatures of the Vietnam War. She co-taught the sophomore tutorial on empire and postcolonial literatures as well as directed year-long junior and senior tutorials for students in the Ethnic Studies, American Studies, European Studies, and Modern World fields.
TEACHING INTERESTS
- Asian American Literature and Ethnic Studies
- Immigration, Migration, Displacement, and Refugees
- Postcolonial and Global Anglophone Literature
- Family, Adoption, and Kinship
- Graphic novels and Visual representation
- Medical Humanities
COURSES FOR EMERSON COLLEGE
- LI 120 Introduction to Literary Studies "Migration and Refugee Narratives"
- LI 423 Topics in Global Literatures "Literatures of the Vietnam War"
COURSES TAUGHT AT HARVARD
- HIST-LIT 90ET Asian America's Vietnam War
- FRSEMR 64E Asian American Literature
- HIST-LIT 90DK Asian American Graphic Novels
- HIST-LIT 97 Education and Empire
- HIST-LIT 98 Junior Tutorial
- HIST-LIT 99 Senior Tutorial and Senior Honors Thesis
- Summer School ENGL S-241 Drawing Asia/America in Graphic Novels
COURSES TAUGHT AT UCLA
- GE CLST M71CW Biotechnology and Society Seminar "Bodies of Literature, Bodies of Science"
- CL 4CW Enlightment to 20th Century "Out of Place: Exiles, Strangers, and Refugees"
- CL 4DW Great Book of the World at Large "Alternative Families, Alternative Histories"
COURSES TAUGHT AT CSU Long Beach
- CWL 213 Global Comics and Graphic Novels "The Extraordinary Everyday"
