In December 2025 and July 2026, Leslie Barnes delivered keynote addresses for the Australian Society for French Studies [“French Studies Matters”] and for the Colloque international sur les études françaises [“Etudes françaises pour un avenir durable”]. Leslie’s presentations were drawn from her recent book, Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film, and focused on Michel Houellebecq’s ambivalent engagement with sex tourism in Thailand in his 2001 novel, Plateforme.

In January 2026, Maika Nguyen joined the Centre français de recherches en sciences sociales (CEFRES) and Charles University (UK) as a postdoctoral researcher. During her two-year position, she will be working on an analysis of contemporary Vietnamese diasporic literature and film in English, Czech, French and German. Her project, entitled ‘”Vietnamese” Across “Europe”: Displacement, Identity and Dis/connections’ (VAEDID), focuses in particular on the voices and representations of Vietnamese diaspora in post-Soviet states, as well as collective memories of East/West (Europe) and North/ South (Vietnam). Congratulations, Maika!

Sex Work in Southeast Asia (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under twenty-first-century global imperialism, exploring the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogating the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. 

Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, it explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. Its scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms with which we make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacle of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge.

The book is accessible through JStor, and a detailed discussion can also be found on the New Books Network podcast.

Despite a century of French colonialism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, this history remains strikingly absent from the French national imaginary. France’s humiliation at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 produced a collective amnesia that effectively buried the memory of colonial Indochina—and with it, the stories of the millions of people caught up in the project of empire and its unraveling. At this year’s Annual Conference of the Society for French Historical Studies, ASERN members Elizabeth Collins and Jack Yeager, together with invited collaborator Alix Douart-Sinnouretty, brought some of these occluded histories to light.

Their panel, “Remembering Indochina in Contemporary France,” examined how recent works counter this historical amnesia through creative and documentary forms. Collins’s presentation focused on podcasts by descendants of the Français rapatriés d’Indochine—families repatriated to mainland France after 1954—showing how these works weave together personal, familial, and colonial histories to fill the gaps left by official narratives. Douart-Sinnouretty, creator of the documentary podcast Vietnam-sur-Lot (2023), reflected on the silences surrounding memory transmission among repatriate communities, in particular those of her family members who were brought to the Cité d’Accueil des Français rapatriés d’Indochine, or the CAFI, in Sainte-Livrade-sur-Lot in southwestern France in 1956. Yeager discussed his forthcoming translation of ethnographer Dominique Rolland’s Petits Viêt-Nams (2009), the first sustained account of the repatriate families who lived for three generations at the CAFI. Afterwards, the panelists shared an excellent dinner at locally renowned restaurant, Gabriella’s Vietnam, in South Philadelphia. 

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.