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.

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