"UCLA Professor Thu-huong Nguyen-vo Gains Tenure "

UCLA Professor Thu-huong Nguyen-vo has been promoted to Associate Professor, Step I with tenure in the Asian Languages and Cultures (ALC) Department, Asian American Studies Department (AAS), and the Southeast Asian Studies Interdepartmental Program (SEAS IDP).

Professor Nguyen-vo is an active member of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and served as co-editor of a special issue of the Center's Amerasia Journal, "30 Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans & U.S. Empire," along with UC San Diego Professor Yen Espiritu. She has served as Vice Chair of the Asian American Studies Department and is this year's recipient of the C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies.

Professor Nguyen-vo's teaching and research interests focus on women, literature, political and cultural practices in the current phase of globalization.  She is the author of The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neo-liberal Governance in Vietnam (Univerisity of Washington Press, 2008), which examines the practices of commercial sex, the governmental policies that address it, and its narration in popular culture to explore how neoliberal freedoms are imagined and governed.  The book finds that as Vietnam marketizes and integrates into the global economy, the government bolsters its own power by governing differentially according to gender and to class, using both choice and repression, in order to provide different types of consumers and workers for the neo-liberal global economy. More broadly, the book suggests neoliberalism requires such paradoxical governance. This project won two awards-the UC President's Fellowship in the
Humanities, and the Andrew Mellon/Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship in 2004-2005.

A political scientist, Dr. Nguyen-vo's current research project explores how our sense of the material has been altered by two interrelated phenomena of our time: 'spectralization' of global capitalism and large-scale migration.  Materiality in such contexts remains pivotal, but it must be understood in a different way. Vietnam and its diasporas present a rich case in which the history of materialist thinking from a century of colonial and nationalist modernization, industrialization, Marxist revolution, interacts with the new spectral economy and migration in a compressed timeframe. This book project investigates how people re-imagine the material in their understanding of self and history in this new context of globalization in Vietnam and migration in the US by looking at consumption and work among Vietnamese workers, literary representations of them in fiction, poetry and public protest that contest neocolonial government policies; as well as Vietnamese American memorial practices, and Vietnamese American fiction dealing with memory and history.

Born in Saigon, and raised in Vietnam and the US, Professor Nguyen-vo received her B.A. in Asian Studies from CSULB, and her PhD in Political Science from UC Irvine.  Prior to coming to UCLA in 2001, she held a position at CSULA.