Catherine H. Nguyen

Catherine H. Nguyen earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her project Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War: Vietnamese Diasporic Contestations of Empire and Race investigates the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee as the figures through which the United States and France negotiate citizenship and refugee displacement and rewrite military loss in their histories of empire in Vietnam. It challenges the prevailing idea that constructs the mixed-race child as an object of rescue by employing the conceptual framework of hospitality to reveal the impossibility of their full incorporation through repatriation and adoption. Examining documentary films, memoirs, and literary works 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 research and teaching interests include Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, critical refugee studies, and critical adoptee studies as well as graphic novels and visual culture. Her essays have appeared in Adoption & Culture and in edited volumes on multiethnic graphic novels and on postmigratory Francophone literature. Nguyen is a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and was previously a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard.