About Catherine

Catherine H. Nguyen is a comparative literary scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora and Asian American literature. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures with the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College, Boston, MA. Catherine was previously a Fellow of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard 2021-2022 and the 2021 ACLS Fellowship Program.

Catherine works in and at the intersections of Asian American, transpacific, postcolonial, and critical refugee studies. Her book project Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War investigates the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee as the figures through which the United States and France negotiate citizenship and refugee displacement and rewrite military loss in their histories of empire in Vietnam. It challenges the prevailing idea that constructs the mixed-race child as an object of rescue by employing the conceptual framework of hospitality to reveal the impossibility of their full incorporation through repatriation and adoption. Examining documentary films, memoirs, and literary works in French and English, the project explores how the mixed-race child as subject complicates the categories of refugee and adoptee and simultaneously undermines the expected gratitude with acts of hostility.

More broadly, Catherine's research and teaching interests include Asian American and Asian diasporic literatures, critical refugee studies, critical adoptee studies, and interrogations of empire and militarism, questions of form and figuration as well as graphic novels and visual culture written in English and French. Her essays have appeared in Adoption & Culture and l'ésprit créateur and in edited volumes on multiethnic graphic novels, postmigratory Francophone literature, and the Vietnamese diaspora.

Catherine is a member of the Asie du Sud Est Research Network (ASERN) and serves on the editorial committee of the Diasporic Vietnamese Aritsts Network (DVAN).

Academic Appointments

• Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Emerson College (2022- )
• Fellow, ACLS Fellowship Program '21, American Council of Learned Societies (2022-2023)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, Harvard University (2021-2022)
• Lecturer, Committee on the Degrees of History and Literature, Harvard University (2018-2021)

Education

• PhD, Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
• Masters de Recherche, Littérature comparée, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I

Research Interests

• Vietnamese diasporic literatures
• Asian American Studies
• Critiques of the Vietnam War, U.S. empire, and militarism
• Operation Babylift and Critical Adoption Studies
• Critical Refugee Studies
• French imperialism, Francophone literature, and Indochine
• Graphic novels and visual culture

Catherine teaches literature courses that range from immigration and world literature to Asian American literature and the Vietnamese diaspora. She has taught undergraduate courses on immigration and refugees from the Enlightenment to the 21st century, representations of medicine and race in fiction, and global graphic novels among other classes. As a Lecturer on History & Literature, Catherine taught seminars on Asian American literature, Asian diasporic graphic novels, and literatures of the Vietnam War. She co-taught the sophomore tutorial on empire and postcolonial literatures as well as directed year-long junior and senior tutorials for students in the Ethnic Studies, American Studies, European Studies, and Modern World fields. At Emerson College, Catherine teaches courses on postcolonial and world literature, migration and refugee cultural production, the Vietnam War/the American War and critical refugee studies, and Asian American studies.

Teaching Interests

• Asian American Literature and Ethnic Studies
• Immigration, Migration, Displacement, and Refugees
• Postcolonial and Global Anglophone Literature
• Family, Adoption, and Kinship
• Graphic novels and Visual representation
• Medical Humanities

Courses for Emerson College

• LI 120 Introduction to Literary Studies "Migration Narratives"
• LI 120 Introduction to Literary Studies "Literature Out of Place"
• LI 203 Literatures in English "Literary Constellations"
• LI 209 Topics in US Multicultural Literature "Asian American Graphic Narratives"
• LI 421 Topics in American Literature "Multi-ethnic Memoirs"
• LI 423 Topics in Global Literatures "Literatures of the Vietnam War"
• LI 423 Topics in Global Literatures "Literatures of Refuge(es)" 

Courses Taught at Harvard

• HIST-LIT 90ET Asian America's Vietnam War
• FRSEMR 64E Asian American Literature
• HIST-LIT 90DK Asian American Graphic Novels
• HIST-LIT 97 Education and Empire
• HIST-LIT 98 Junior Tutorial
• HIST-LIT 99 Senior Tutorial and Senior Honors Thesis
• Summer School ENGL S-241 Drawing Asia/America in Graphic Novels

Courses Taught at UCLA

• GE CLST M71CW Biotechnology and Society Seminar "Bodies of Literature, Bodies of Science"
• CL 4CW Enlightenment to 20th Century "Out of Place: Exiles, Strangers, and Refugees"
• CL 4DW Great Books of the World at Large "Alternative Families, Alternative Histories"

Courses Taught at CSU Long Beach

• CWL 213 Global Comics and Graphic Novels "The Extraordinary Everyday"