Organizers

Lead Conference Organizer

Fiona I.B. Ngô is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies. She co-coordinated (with Mariam B. Lam) the first Southeast Asian American studies conference, "30 Years Beyond the War: Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and Asian/American Studies," held at the University of California, Riverside, in 2005. Her research interests include comparative ethnic studies, mixed-race and transnational identity, imperialism and U.S. culture, Vietnamese/American and Southeast Asian/American studies, gender studies, queer studies, U.S. cultural and intellectual history, modernisms, musical cultures, performance studies, and critical and cultural theory. She is currently completing a manuscript about imperial logics of gender, race, nation and sexuality in musical cultures and nightlife in Jazz Age New York City.

Conference Organizer and Programming Committee

Mimi Thi Nguyen is an assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect. She continues to situate her work within transnational feminist cultural studies with her next project, focusing on fashion, citizenship and transnationality. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and author of multiple essays on Asian American, queer, and punk subcultures, digital technologies, and Vietnamese diasporic cultures.

Programming Committee

Viet Thanh Nguyen is an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and books, including American Literary History, Western American Literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, The New Centennial Review, Postmodern Culture, and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass. He was a Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and his short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Manoa, Orchid: A Literary Review, Best New American Voices 2007, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize. He is currently working on two book projects, a collection of short stories and a comparative, multidisciplinary study of American and Vietnamese cultural production about the American war in Viet Nam.