Catherine Nguyen has been awarded a 12-month fellowship by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, 2025-2026.  This was formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship.

Félicitations, Catherine!

In April 2025, Maika Nguyen successfully defended her thesis at the University College Dublin, titled ‘Writing Home: Haiti and Vietnam in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï’. Closely comparing the autofictional texts of Vietnamese writer Anna Moï (Nostalgie de la rizière, L’Année du Cochon de Feu and Le Pays sans nom) alongside those (Pays sans chapeau and L’ Énigme du retour) of Dany Laferrière, from Haïti, the thesis argues that these autofictional narratives call into question the position of the returnee narrator in the homeland. In doing so, they redraw understandings of self and other, emphasising the continuously changing relationship between 
displacement, mobility and home.

Félicitations, Maika!

Photo: From left to right: Associate Professor Sharae Deckard (UCD English), Drapers Professor Charles Forsdick (University of Cambridge), Maika Nguyen, Professor Mary Gallagher and Associate Professor Emer O’Beirne (UCD SLCL

In October 2025, Clément Baloup, French-Vietnamese graphic novelist and visiting scholar at the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, spent two weeks in Australia teaching, running comic workshops, and leading seminars on graphic art, memory and diasporic narratives. His visit coincided with the release of Vietnamese Memories: Down Under, his fifth volume in the Mémoires de Viet Kieu series. Co-translated by Dr Tess Do (University of Melbourne) and Dr Charlotte Mackay (Monash University), Baloup’s latest graphic novel––now available at Readings––was presented at the Graphic Narrative Symposium, the public seminar Graphic storytelling from Down Under: visualising Vietnamese memory in Australia (University of Melbourne), and the 2025 Annual European Languages Lecture (Monash University). Baloup also gave two interviews on SBS Radio (Vietnamese and French programs) and met with friends and readers at the Vietnamese community-led book launch in Footscray, Victoria. These major public and inter-institutional events brought together a diverse audience of students, scholars, artists, and members of the Australian, French, and Vietnamese diasporic communities –– including Ms Paule Ignatio, Consul General of France in Melbourne–-reflects the resonance of Baloup’s work across cultures, histories, and generations.

Alex Kurmann has just published a chapter Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) in the Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel. Vuong’s novel not only offers a personal literary exploration of what it is to be a gay Vietnamese refugee coming of age in working-class America, but also presents an intimate heterobiography of subjects negotiating queer or diasporic identifications in a changing social class landscape.

The novel specifically explores class at the intersection of refugeeism and sexuality through interrelational connections. These reflect a Foucauldian model of friendship that sees productive new relationships forged in unexpected places amid social discomfort and discordance (1981). Vuong’s depictions of working-class bi-racial, queer and cross-generational relationships speak to Tom Roach’s aligned concept of ‘friendship as shared estrangement’ (2012), which is interpreted here as relationships that socially or culturally alienated subjects uneasily yet unaffectedly forge with their own Others. Narrativizing such intersectional interrelationality keeps alive complex identities that sit outside of prescribed white, middle-class, heterosexual norms, while also memorialising Asian American working-class survival.

Through the literary analysis of interrelationality, the chapter argues that re-examinations of the question of class sociality characterise the millennial novel. In particular, it proposes that Vuong diversifies Intersectional Literary Studies by bringing attention to the disadvantage experienced by multi-ethnic working-class people in the United States.

Details on the collection here.

Nguyễ Giáng Hương’s Littérature vietnamienne francophone has been translated into Vietnamese by the Hố Chì Minh General Publishing House. The Việt Nam New Weekend announced the publication in a recent edition. In their spread on the publication, they quote literary scholar, Phạm Xuân Nguyên, who claims that “along with Jack Yeager’s The Vietnamese Novel in French, this book is “crucial for anyone interested in 20th-century Vietnamese literature.”

For more details (in Vietnamese), check out the publisher’s site.

The Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center opened its doors in Phnom Penh in December 2006, with the aim of collecting and making widely accessible the country’s audiovisual heritage. Since then, it has provided practical training and professional support to hundreds of aspiring archivists, filmmakers and audiovisual technicians. At the same time, it has become a hub for discussion and artistic creation centred on the history, memory and future of Cambodia.

This chapter is a part of a hybrid and dialogic history of the Bophana Center. As a process of co-creation, the telling of this history crosses geographic, temporal, professional and genre boundaries, bringing artists, technicians, academics and audiences together to share their knowledge and lived experience of Cambodia and cinema. This material is thus the product of an unscripted conversation that was recorded, transcribed and rendered in textual form. In it, we explore the intersections of documentary filmmaking, wildlife exploitation, historical trauma and indigenous knowledge, with particular focus on an elephant conservation project managed by the Bophana Center in 2020. Three overarching questions anchor the discussion: Why cinema? What harm? What repair?

More information here.

Paris a accueilli et nourri Pham Van Ky depuis son départ du Vietnam pour ses études à l’étranger. Cette ville a été cruciale dans les réflexions de l’écrivain et est devenu le symbole de sa quête d’harmonie entre l’Orient et l’Occident. Dans le Fonds Pham Van Ky de la Bibliothèque nationale de France sont conservés les tapuscrits d’une vingtaine de romans inédits. Paris, qu’as-tu fait de nous ? est l’un des textes les plus longs. Ce récit prend pour sujet ce que Paris inspire à l’auteur. La conférence, donnée par Giang-HuongNguyen (BnF) et Angelina Guo (ENS de Paris), portera sur l’étude de ce roman inédit et sur les aspects de (ré)conciliation entre l’Orient et l’Occident qui y sont abordés.

Le 6 février, dans le cadre du séminaire « France-Vietnam : un portail entre entre les cultures », NGUYEN Giang Huong  (BnF)​ et Angelina Guo(ENS de Paris) ont consacré une conférence sur l’écrivain Pham Van Ky et son manuscrit, Paris, qu’as-tu fait de nous ?

Trouver le programme annuel des séances sur le site de la BNF.

Howie Tam has written a short piece on the late Anthony Veasna So’s collection of short stories, Afterparties (2021), which won the National Book Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best first book.

Read Howie’s article here.

Image: The Nation

2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the official end of the Second Indochina War and the solidification of Communist regimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. 1975 also ushered in waves of Southeast Asian refugee and other migrant movements, establishing new communities around the world, including in Australia, Canada, France, and the US.         

In January, ASERN came together in an MLA roundtable to revisit 1975 as a nodal point and to reflect on the legacies of war and trauma in communities both national and diasporic. With a general focus on cultural production in French, we looked at some of the trajectories of imperialism and migration that link France, Southeast Asia, and the United States, evoking different intersecting histories of 1975 and beyond, and the disciplines and representational strategies that have arisen to grapple with the legacies of these histories. Immediately after the panel, we took a field trip to Dong Phuong bakery in New Orleans East to sample the Vietnamese version of the New Orleans king cake, which is itself an American take on the French galette des rois.

Le 21 juillet 1954, la signature des accords de Genève scelle l’indépendance du Vietnam, du Laos et du Cambodge. Pour le Vietnam proprement dit, ce n’est qu’en 1975 que le Nord et le Sud se réunifient en un seul État. Que reste-t-il de l’Indochine dans la mémoire collective 70 ans après l’armistice ? Que connaît-on du Vietnam après 50 ans de réunification ?

Opening the 2024-2025 ‘France-Vietnam’ series at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, this session hosted by Giáng Hương featured historian, Alain Ruscio in dialogue with Doan Bui, journalist with Le Nouvel Observateur.

More details on the series here.