Nguyen, Trung P.

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Email

Preferred: trung.p.nguyen@sjsu.edu

Office Hours

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Education

Ph.D. - UCSC, History of Consciousness (Designated Emphases: Feminist Studies; Critical Race and Ethnic Studies)

M.A. - UCLA, Asian American Studies (Concentration: Gender Studies)

B.A. - UCLA, Asian American Studies 

Bio

Trung PQ Nguyen (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at SJSU. His research examines the sensory afterlives of war and the rhetorical circulation of Vietnamese materials under the US empire. He is currently working on a book manuscript, Loss in Perpetuity: Iterative Vietnam and the Racial Mediation of Permanent War, which examines how loss in particular gets mobilized for counterinsurgent purposes, like fascism, by the state apparatuses of permanent war, and how Vietnam becomes the ideal object lesson to reinstate this structure of state violence in other episodes of empire's deployment. He was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Asian American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 2021-2022, and the Managing Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies from 2017-2018 and Critical Ethnic Studies from 2019-2021.

He is pursuing the following forthcoming projects: 1) a history of the convergence between race, tech, and policing in San Jose and its disciplinary impact on refugee and undocumented communities; 2) a study on post-war remains and anti-imperial aesthetics through Vietnamese diasporic art/film; and 3) a critical genealogy of the "schizophrenia" diagnosis as it shapes Southeast Asian American resettlement and lifeworlds. His other research interests include: queer of color critique, women of color feminisms, visual culture and media studies, cultural studies, social movement theory, policing, and STS. 

He has taught courses on critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality, Asian American contemporary communities, Asian American gender and sexuality, race in horror film, race and visual culture, histories of labor and resistance in immigrant communities, and critical refugee studies. 

He has advised Asian American activist and Southeast Asian student organizations. He was born and raised in East Side San Jose, and a product of ESUHSD. He is happy to meet with undergraduate and graduate students interested in any of the above. 

 

Links

Publications

The Labor of Absolution: National Detritus and the Op-Ed Form of the Vietnamese Refugee. Critical Ethnic Studies 6.2. January 2021.  

Refugee Returns: Solidarity, Pandemic, and Temporal Intimacies in the Belly of the Beast. Critical Ethnic Studies blog. October 2020.   

Specular Vietnam and the Cinematics of Distraction (in a Collaborative Review of Forgetting Vietnam). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5.2. Fall 2019. 

Review of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1.1. 2015.