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Thu-hương Nguyễn-võ

Professor

Areas of Interest:

Biography

Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương holds a split appointment in Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies. Her current book, Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge at World’s End (2024), looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist in catastrophes. Her other publications explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the (inter)colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American, and other artists, writers, and activists. She teaches graduate seminars in critical theory and undergraduate courses in Vietnamese and Vietnamese American politics and culture.

Areas of Interest

Alternative epistemologies, time, and the human in relation to necroeconomics and necropolitics. Futurist visions at intercolonial moments in early 20th century, the 1960s, and after. Intersections between Vietnamese and Black Studies.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine
M.A., California State University, Long Beach

Publications

Monographs:

Edited volumes

  • Co-editor with Yen Le Espiritu and Russell Leong, 30 Years afterward: Vietnamese Americans and US Empire, a special issue of Amerasia Journal 31:2 (2005).

Articles and book chapters:

  • “ Empire, Nation, and Biên Hòa Ceramics: Craft as a Site of Chronopolitical Reproduction,” in Craft and Heritage: Intersections in Critical Studies and Practice, eds.  Elaine C. Paterson and Susan Surette, London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2021.
  • “Articulated Sorrows: Intercolonial Imaginings and the National Singular,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 48:3 (November 2018): 327-351.
  • “The grammar of failure: dispossession, mourning, and the afterlife of socialist futurities,” coauthors Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo & Grace Kyungwon Hong, Social Identities, 24:2 (2018), 155-172.
  • “Into Time: Hồ the Futurist and the Founding of the Nation,” South East Asia Research, 25:1 (2017): 62-79.
  • “The Art of Mixing: Bien Hoa Ceramics and the Question of Nation”/”Gốm Biên Hoà – Nghệ Thuật Pha Trộn và Câu Hỏi về Bản Sắc,” Clay for Thought, curated and edited by Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez and Võ Hồng Chương-Đài. Biên Hoà Ceramics Collective, 2016: 16-42.
  • “Vietnam,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, eds. John Stone, Rutledge M. Dennis, Polly S. Rizova, Anthony D. Smith, and Xiaoshuo Hou. 2016: 1-5. DOI: 10.1002/9781118663202.wberen171
  • “Les Restes Itératifs: Éthique et Esthétique de Représentation de L’Événement Nécropolitique / Iterant Remains: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Mediating the Necropolitical Event“ Chorégraphies Suspendues, curated and edited by Zoe Butt and Jean-Marc Prevost. Nîmes, FR: Musée d’art contemporain Carré d’art, 2014: 82-97.
  • “Epitaphic Nation: The Problem of the South and Necropolitics in Early Modern Vietnamese Literature,” PMLA 126: 3 (2011): 685-692.
  • “The Real and the True: Neoliberalism and Gender Governance in Vietnam,” in Gender Inequalities in Asia, ed. Helle Rydstrom. NIAS Press, 2010: 44-68.
  • “History Interrupted: Life after Material Death in South Vietnamese and Diasporic Fiction,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 3:1 (2008): 1-35.
  • Insa Art Space Journal BOL Winter 2007. Special Issue Vietnam and US, editor of poetry section.
  • “The Body Wager: Materialist Re-signification of Vietnamese Women Workers and Fictional Representation,” Gender, Place, Culture, 13: 3 (June 2006): 267-281.
  •  “Forking Paths: How Shall We Mourn the Dead?” Amerasia Journal 31:2 (2005): 157-175.
  • “Màu Da và Ngôn Ngữ: Văn Chương Di Dân Việt trong Bối Cảnh Hoa Kỳ” [Introduction: Race and Language: Vietnamese Immigrant Literature in the US], in special issue co-edited with Đặng Thơ Thơ, Thế Kỷ 21 October 2005.
  • “Orientalism: Entrances and Exits,” Amerasia Journal 31:1 (2005): 51-54.
  • “The Class Sense of Bodies: Women Garment Workers Consume Body Products in and around Hochiminh City,” in Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam, eds. Lisa Drummond and Helle Rydstrom. Singapore University Press and the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies. 2004.
  • “Governing Sex: Medicine and Governmental Intervention in Prostitution,” in Gender, Household, State: Doi Moi in Vietnam edited by Jayne Werner and Daniele Belanger. NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2002.
  • “Orange into White: Asian Americans and the Post-colonial Conservatism of Bush’s Era” National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac 2001-2002, eds. Don Nakanishi and James Lai. University of California Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center. 2001.
  • Articles, commentaries, and reviews from 1988 to present in a Vietnamese-language edited volume, and the following Vietnamese-language periodicals: Bản Tin Khoa Học (CA), Người Dân (CA), Thế Kỷ 21(CA), Hợp Lưu (CA), Đối Thoại (CA), Triết (CA), Viễn đông (CA), Việt Tide (CA), Trăm Con (Canada), Diễn Đàn Forum (France), Talawas (Online journal), Tiền Vệ (Online journal), ProContra (Online Journal).

Thu-hương Nguyễn-võ