Catherine Nguyen

Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen is a comparative literary scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her scholarship encompasses Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, critical adoption studies, and Global Asias.

Her current book project focuses on representations of the Vietnamese mixed race child and the transracial adoptee from the longue durée of the Indochina Wars to their refugee aftermaths. Examining literary and cultural works in French and English, the project explores how the Vietnamese child complicates the categories of the refugee and the adoptee within discourses of humanitarian aid.

Dr. Nguyen’s work has appeared in Adoption & Culture and l’esprit créateur, and in edited volumes on multiethnic graphic novels, postmigratory Francophone literature, and the Vietnamese diaspora. Current research projects include interrogations of diaspora and resettlement, form and figuration throughout the Vietnamese diaspora and Cold War Asias, more broadly.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, as well as grants from the Harvard University Asia Center and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship. Dr. Nguyen was an Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement fellow, a postdoctoral fellow of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and an American Council of Learned Societies fellow.

Prior to joining Emerson College, Dr. Nguyen was a lecturer of history and literature at Harvard University.