Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 andContinue reading “Leslie Barnes keynotes French Studies conferences in Australia and Thailand”

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, IdentityContinue reading “Maika Nguyen joins the CEFRES and Charles University”

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,Continue reading “New publication by Leslie Barnes: Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film”

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 projectContinue reading “ASERN at the Society for French Historical Studies”

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 duContinue reading “Maika Nguyen, “Writing Home””

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 VietContinue reading “Clément Baloup’s Visit and the Launch of Vietnamese Memories: Down Under”

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 negotiatingContinue reading “New publication by Alex Kurmann: “Writing Millennial Lives at The Intersection of Class, Queerness and Refugeeism: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous””

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 inContinue reading “New publication by Nguyễn Giáng Hương: ‘Litterature vietnamienne francophone’ out in Vietnamese”