Researchers

Leslie Barnes

Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Nebraska, 2014), and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Her current project studies literary and cinematic narratives that engage with questions of sex work, mobility, and human rights in Southeast Asia. She has published on these and other subjects in Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Modern Language Notes, and French Cultural Studies. 

Karl Britto

Karl Britto is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is author of Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality (Hong Kong UP, 2004) and recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award (2008), Berkeley’s highest honor for teaching.  

Elizabeth Collins 

Elizabeth Collins is a Lecturer of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in French and Francophone Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020. Her research explores colonialism, race, migration, and culture in relation to the legacy of France’s empire in Asia, with a focus on the Vietnamese diaspora in the francophone world.  Her work has appeared in Modern and Contemporary France, Contemporary French Civilization, and The Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora. In 2022, her article “‘Le Riz d’Indochine’ at the French table: representations of food, race and the Vietnamese in a colonial-era board game” was awarded the Best Article Prize by the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (UK).

Tess Do 

Tess Do is a Lecturer in French Studies in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her teaching and research interests lie in the field of Francophone literature and deal with issues related to the colonization and decolonization, exile and migration, cultural identity and the relations between the migrants and their homeland. Focusing in particular on Indochina and the areas of food, memory and cultural heritage, her main publications include articles and book chapters on contemporary Francophone writers of Vietnamese origin. Her current research focuses on the transoceanic memory of the Indochinese indentured workers and the translation into English of Chan Dang, a historical novel by New-Caledonian author Jean Vanmai. 

Martine Guyot-Bender

Martine Guyot-Bender is a Professor of French Literature and Film at Hamilton College. Early in her career, she published two volumes on Patrick Modiano’s novels and their treatment of second-generation memory of the Nazi Occupation: Mémoire en dérive (1998) and Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano (1999). Her interest later shifted toward social documentary, with a focus on the film collective Slon/ISKRA, launched by Chris Marker in 1967. This exploration led her to her current field of interest: the emerging art-house cinema of Cambodia and its French diaspora since the turn of the millennium. Her work focuses on the difficult renaissance of Cambodian art-house cinema, and she is currently completing several articles and a video essay on the subject. In addition to academic publications, she has presented her research on Cambodian cinema in community-focused venues, including Utica, NY—home to a strong Cambodian refugee population—and the 2025 Maine International Film Festival, where she is curating a program of short Cambodian homegrown films.

Alexandra Kurmann 

Alexandra Kurmann is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. She completed a PhD in Comparative French and German Literature in 2014 at the University of Melbourne and a Masters in European Comparative Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.  She is a specialist in Vietnamese Diaspora Literature, she works more broadly in refugee, migrant and exile writing in French and English. Her first monograph is entitled Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader.  

Caroline D. Laurent

Caroline D. Laurent D. Laurent is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies whose interdisciplinary research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Francophone literatures and cultures, with special emphasis on Metropolitan France, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. She notably specializes in comparative genocide studies in relation to literature and art. Her book manuscript, The Words of Others: Remembering and Writing Genocide as an Indirect Witness, examines literary and graphic representations of genocidal violence (the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmers rouges’ violence and genocide in Cambodia). She is particularly interested in the perspectives of indirect witnesses and in issues related to transgenerational transmission of trauma. She has published several articles on these questions in Nouvelles études francophones, French Cultural Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Catherine Nguyen 

Catherine H. Nguyen is a comparative literature scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her book project Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War focuses on the mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee from the longue durée of the Indochina Wars to their refugee aftermaths. Examining documentary films, memoirs, and literary works of the Vietnamese diaspora produced 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.  Nguyen’s work has appeared in Adoption & Culture and in edited volumes. Her current projects intervene in critical refugee studies and critical adoption studies and interrogate Cold War Asia and form and figuration. Previously a postdoctoral fellow for the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and an American Council of Learned Societies fellow, Nguyen is an Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College. 

Nguyen Giang Huong 

Nguyen Giang Huong is the Head of the Southeast Asian (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) Languages and Civilization Division at the François Mitterrand – National Library of France and Fellow Researcher at the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ITEM), under the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is also editor-in-chief of the website: vietlitfr.hypothese.org. Nguyen completed a PhD in French Literature in 2015 at University Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on Vietnamese Francophone and Diaspora Literature, she works more broadly on intercultural and exile issues in Vietnamese-French writing.  

Her first monograph,  La Littérature vietnamienne francophone (1913-1986), published in 2018, obtained the Renaissance Française Prize from the French Academy for Overseas Sciences in 2019.  She edited simultaneously an anthology entitled Pham Van Ky: un taoïsme littéraire, comprising critical articles and unpublished texts by this writer. 

Panivong Norindr 

Panivong Norindr is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is author of Phantasmatic Indochina (1996).

Angelica Pisey So 

Angelica P. So earned her Ph.D. in French literature at Emory University in 2019. Her research focuses on Cambodian postmemory, the Cambodian and Vietnamese diaspora, and Southeast Asian and Asian American identities. Her articles on Southeast Asian Francophone literature and culture have been published in The French Review, Genocide Studies and Prevention, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. She is currently advocating for Asian representation among French literary curations as an independent researcher and bookseller at Albertine Books at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, with the goal to update and positively influence what gets defined as being part of “French culture.” Angelica’s mission is to give cross-disciplinary, nuanced art a seat at the cultural table, where it has the opportunity to be more publicly accessible and impact generational shifts. Previously, Angelica served as Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Emory University, as well as Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Fellow in the department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of New Mexico.

Howie Tam 

Howie Tam is an Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Prior to his current position, Tam held postcolonial fellowships at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center and at Dartmouth College upon earning his PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His book project in progress, Rewriting Vietnam: Forms of Nationhood in Diasporic Literature, examines complex modes of national belonging, refugee cultural politics, and the Vietnam War’s legacy in diasporic Vietnamese literature from the United States and France—the two countries with the most entrenched imperial legacies in the country. Studying English- and French-language texts comparatively, this project rethinks “Vietnam” the war as not only an American war but also a Vietnamese civil war, in which communist North battled noncommunist South for sovereignty after French colonial rule. Rewriting Vietnam demonstrates how diasporic subjects challenge dominant narratives of war and postcolonial nation-building across Vietnam, the U.S., and France. Tam’s research and teaching interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, queer of color criticism, Vietnamese studies, and U.S. and French critical race studies. His essays have appeared in American Literature, the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, among others.

_{Yen Vu}

Yen Vu is a Vietnamese-American scholar in French and Vietnamese Studies who earned her PhD in 2019 from Cornell University. She is a faculty member in Literature at Fulbright University Vietnam. She specializes on Vietnamese francophone literature and intellectual politics in 20th century Vietnam, with her present manuscript project focusing on how Vietnamese intellectuals have worked with and through language to establish their own ideas of freedom in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. Her work has been published in Environmental Humanities, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Diaspora. She also co-hosts the podcast, “Nam Phong Dialogues: casual chats on Vietnamese History,” where she discusses academia, Vietnamese-American identity and the latest research on Vietnam, available on Spotify. 

Jack Yeager  

Jack A. Yeager is a Professor of French Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University-Baton Rouge (Emeritus). Before his arrival at LSU, he taught for twenty years at the University of New Hampshire-Durham. He studied intensive Vietnamese for a year as an Air Force enlistee at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California before spending some nineteen months stationed in East and Southeast Asia. After his military service, he earned a PhD in French with a minor in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses primarily on Vietnamese Francophone narrative from Southeast Asia, Europe and North America and has appeared as monographs and in anthologies and journals. In 2016, he returned to Viet Nam on a Fulbright to teach American studies at Vietnam National University-Hanoi in the University of Languages and International Studies. His English translation of Kim Lefèvre’s autobiography Métisse blanche as White Métisse was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018.  

PhD Students

Maika Nguyen

Maika Nguyen is a PhD Candidate at University College Dublin, and her thesis is entitled ‘Writing Home: Haiti and Vietnam in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï’. In it, she focuses on the position of the returnee figure in relations between diaspora and homeland, with an emphasis on the spatial negotiations of ‘home’ in autofictional writing. She is interested in diaspora and mobility studies, and, more recently, migration within the Soviet Bloc (East Germany/Czechoslovakia).

Alan Yeh

Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in refugitude aesthetics, memory, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. Drawing on diasporic Vietnamese literature, archival research, and oral histories, his dissertation examines the ways in which diasporic and refugee subjects reimagine care and food as care, interrogate their promises, and expose their coercive co-optations. His research has appeared inL’Esprit Créateur and has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation as well as Berkeley’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.