Bao-Yen Ngoc Vu

Fields of Interest: Vietnamese and diasporic literature, colonial history, postcolonial theory, intellectual history

Education: Ph.D. 2019, Cornell University, USA

Bio:  Yen Vu is a first-generation Vietnamese-American scholar in French and Vietnamese Studies who earned her PhD in 2019 from Cornell University. Prior to coming to Fulbright, she taught French language and literature at Hamilton College, a top-15 liberal arts college in the US for two years, and held a postdoctoral research position in Modern Vietnamese Studies at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She specializes in Vietnamese francophone literature and intellectual history in 20th century Vietnam, with her present manuscript project focusing on how Vietnamese intellectuals have worked with and through language to establish their own ideas of freedom in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam. 

She has presented her research at annual meetings of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Association for Asian Studies, as well as abroad, such as at the Institut national des langues et cultures orientales in Paris, France. Her scholarship has also appeared in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and Diaspora.

As a scholar-teacher, she’s invested in making her research accessible to a broad public. This is the impetus behind her co-hosted podcast, “Nam Phong Dialogues: casual chats on Vietnamese History,” which you can find on spotify, apple, and listen notes. The question of inclusion and accessibility also figures into her teaching by incorporating unconventional assignments, encouraging learning outside of the classroom, and using diverse materials and sources.

Select Publications:  

“Phạm Quỳnh, borrowed language, and the ambivalences of colonial discourse” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Vol. 51. no. 2, June 2020.

“Contested Kinship: Vietnamese Prodigal sons and ideas of rootedness” Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol. 20, no. 3, February 2020.

“Tran Van Tung’s vision of a New Nationalism,” Rethinking Republican Vietnam: Ideological and Political Foundations of the First Republic, 1920-1963, ed. Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu. (forthcoming with University of Hawaii Press)