Marguerite Nguyen (NHC Fellow, 2023–24)

Marguerite Nguyen studies twentieth- to twenty-first-century American and Asian American literature. She is author of America’s Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire (Temple University Press, 2018) and coeditor of “Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War” (MELUS, 2016). Prior to joining the faculty at Wesleyan University, she spent time researching dynamics of race, migration, environment, and narrative form in Southeast Asian American cultures of Louisiana. Her next project, Refugee Ecologies, is based on this work and interprets American literature as a fraught practice of worldbuilding in contexts of disaster and displacement, particularly as depicted by writers of color.

Selected Publications

• Nguyen, Marguerite. “Refugee Ecologies: Narratives of Vietnamese Diaspora.” In Diaspora and Literary Studies, edited by Angela Naimou. Cambridge Critical Concepts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
• Nguyen, Marguerite. “1.5 Generation Asian American Literature.” In Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996, Vol. 3, edited by Asha Nadkarni and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, 64–78. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Nguyen, Marguerite. America’s Vietnam: The Longue Durée of US Literature and Empire. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018.
• Nguyen, Marguerite. “Asian American New Orleans.” In New Orleans: A Literary History, edited by T.R. Johnson, 314–29. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
• Nguyen, Marguerite, Catherine Fung, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. “On Writing, Radicalism, and Literary Value: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen.” MELUS 42, no. 3 The World, The Multi-Ethnic Text, and the Critic (Fall 2017): 201–21.