Ann Ngoc Tran (she/her) is a scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora and a researcher of boat migration, Southeast Asian non-states, and refugee deathworlds at the frontiers of empire and capital. Her book project, Non-Arrival: Histories of Drift and Disappearance After the Vietnam War, tells a history of boat migration through the movement of people into, out of, and across the watery expanse of the South China Sea. Focusing on the two decades following the fall of the central highlands in 1975, this manuscript explores the dangerous environments and social conditions that propelled Vietnamese people to vượt biên—to cross borders and seas—and the historical processes that shaped them into refugees, economic migrants, illegal immigrants, and boat people. Challenging state-centric narratives that frequently position boat refugees within temporal (refugee to resettlement) or spatial (homeland to asylum) trajectories, Non-Arrival turns instead to the people abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those caught or left behind in the homeland between 1975 and 1992, halted or unfinished journeys at sea, boat refugee cemeteries in Southeast Asia, and deadly incidents of pushback and forced return in Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. In surfacing histories of deathworlds, disappearance, interdiction, and denied landing within the archives and historiographies of the postwar, the book seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and receiving nation-states, pivoting instead to the contingencies of migration through structural and material specificities that include the boat, the ship, and the graveyard.

Ann received her PhD in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Outside of academia, she volunteers as an archivist at the Vietnamese Heritage Museum in Orange County, California.