This is the first of two events in the Summer Book Club co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific Studies Institute and Duke Libraries' Global Studies Department. The book club will feature author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, be held online.

Be sure to register via Zoom >>

Speaker

Marguerite Nguyen (APSI; Department of English, Duke)

Professor Marguerite Nguyen (Duke) launches our two-book sequence with Nguyen's 2015 multiple award-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. The discussion will take place online, so members of the community near and far are welcome to join.

Marguerite Nguyen is an Associate Professor of English. Her research and teaching cover American literature, Asian American literature, Vietnamese diasporic studies, critical refugee studies, and ecocriticism. She is author of America's Vietnam: The Longue Durée of US Literature and Empire (Temple University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War (MELUS Special Issue, 2016). Her research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and National Humanities Center. She is also affiliated with the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program. 

Her current project, Refugee Ecologies, explores local-global understandings of the environment among Vietnamese refugee communities in New Orleans. It posits narratives of forced migration as a defining feature of the US South and of American literature more broadly.