Giang Nguyen-Dien

Dr. Nguyen-Dien is a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas (KU) and was a Sias Graduate Fellow at KU’s Hall Center for Humanities. Her research interests include Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, memories and histories, affect and empire, transpacific critiques, and race relations. Her articles and essays have appeared in/ are forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies, American Studies, Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies (edited by Professor Yen Le Espiritu). She has contributed to several collaborative projects, including a digital humanities initiative that explores Asian experience in the Midwest and a documentary about Asian Americans and racial trauma.

Dr. Nguyen-Dien is currently working on a book manuscript titled Feeling History: The Specter of War, Geography of Violence, and Vietnamese Refugee Affective Worlding. This book explores the afterlives of the Vietnam War through emotional textures of refugee experiences. Situated in a larger scholarship of the haunting of U.S. militarism in Asia-Pacific and the affective afterlives of the Cold War politics, this project emphasizes how the history of empire-building, nation-building, and war-making is also a history of affective cultivation. Through refugee feelings, this work seeks to imagine a new politics of affective decolonization that rests on shared compassions for the ghosts of those who died unjust deaths across multiple geographies of violence.