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Professor Thu-huong Nguyen-vo gains tenure at UCLA
------ Forwarded Message
From: "Don T. Nakanishi" <dtn@ucla.edu>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 13:29:59 -0700
UCLA Professor Thu-huong Nguyen-vo has been promoted to Associate
Professor, Step I with tenure in the Asian Languages and Cultures
(ALC) Department, Asian American Studies Department (AAS), and the
Southeast Asian Studies Interdepartmental Program (SEAS IDP).
Professor Nguyen-vo is an active member of the UCLA Asian American
Studies Center, and served as co-editor of a special issue of the
Center's Amerasia Journal, "30 Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans
& U.S. Empire," along with UC San Diego Professor Yen Espiritu. She
has served as Vice Chair of the Asian American Studies Department and
is this year's recipient of the C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide
Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies.
Professor Nguyen-vo's teaching and research interests focus on women,
literature, political and cultural practices in the current phase of
globalization. She is the author of The Ironies of Freedom: Sex,
Culture, and Neo-liberal Governance in Vietnam (Univerisity of
Washington Press, 2008), which examines the practices of commercial
sex, the governmental policies that address it, and its narration in
popular culture to explore how neoliberal freedoms are imagined and
governed. The book finds that as Vietnam marketizes and integrates
into the global economy, the government bolsters its own power by
governing differentially according to gender and to class, using both
choice and repression, in order to provide different types of
consumers and workers for the neo-liberal global economy. More
broadly, the book suggests neoliberalism requires such paradoxical
governance. This project won two awards-the UC President's Fellowship
in the Humanities, and the Andrew Mellon/Woodrow Wilson Career
Enhancement Fellowship in 2004-2005.
A political scientist, Dr. Nguyen-vo's current research project
explores how our sense of the material has been altered by two
interrelated phenomena of our time: 'spectralization' of global
capitalism and large-scale migration. Materiality in such contexts
remains pivotal, but it must be understood in a different way.
Vietnam and its diasporas present a rich case in which the history of
materialist thinking from a century of colonial and nationalist
modernization, industrialization, Marxist revolution, interacts with
the new spectral economy and migration in a compressed timeframe.
This book project investigates how people re-imagine the material in
their understanding of self and history in this new context of
globalization in Vietnam and migration in the US by looking at
consumption and work among Vietnamese workers, literary
representations of them in fiction, poetry and public protest that
contest neocolonial government policies; as well as Vietnamese
American memorial practices, and Vietnamese American fiction dealing
with memory and history.
Born in Saigon, and raised in Vietnam and the US, Professor Nguyen-vo
received her B.A. in Asian Studies from CSULB, and her PhD in
Political Science from UC Irvine. Prior to coming to UCLA in 2001,
she held a position at CSULA.
--
Don T. Nakanishi, Ph.D.
Director and Professor
UCLA Asian American Studies Center