# Howie Tam ![Howie Tam](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/mahindra/files/howietam.png?itok=vfSBKvSP) email Howie Tam earned his PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His book project in progress, *Rewriting Vietnam: Forms of Nationhood in Diasporic Literature*, examines complex modes of national belonging, refugee cultural politics, and the Vietnam War’s legacy in diasporic Vietnamese literature from the United States and France—the two countries with the most entrenched imperial legacies in the country. Studying English- and French-language texts comparatively, this project rethinks “Vietnam” the war as not only an American war but also a Vietnamese civil war, in which communist North battled noncommunist South for sovereignty after French colonial rule. *Rewriting Vietnam* demonstrates how diasporic subjects challenge dominant narratives of war and postcolonial nation-building across Vietnam, the U.S., and France. The project also juxtaposes racial discourses in France and the U.S. by interrogating the conditions under which these societies have incorporated Vietnamese refugees. Tam’s research and teaching interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, queer of color criticism, Vietnamese studies, and U.S. and French critical race studies. His essays have appeared in *American Literature* and the *Journal of Vietnamese Studies*. Before arriving at Harvard, he was Assistant Director and Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality. - ## Discipline [English](/disciplines/english) - ## Fellowship [Postdoctoral](/fellowship/postdoctoral) - ## Fellowship Year [2020 - 2021](/fellowship-year/2020-2021) - ## Role [Fellows](/role/fellow)