Vietnam and Diasporic Aesthetics: Two Meditations. Dr. Howie Tam & Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen

The first event in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Scholar Series, this program is presented in conjunction with One Day We’ll Go Home and supported in part by the Harvard University Asia Center. Taking as a point of departure some works of Vietnamese American artistic production both in the gallery space and beyond, this two-part talk with Catherine H. Nguyen (Emerson College) and Howie Tam (Brandeis University) explores different approaches of receiving and encountering artworks and engages diasporic aesthetics that grapples with the legacy of the Vietnam War and its enduring questions about creation and memory.

This event is supported by Emerson Contemporary, WLP Scholar Series, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Harvard University Asia Center

Catherine H. Nguyen is an Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College.  She is a comparative literature scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her current book project examines the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee from the longue durée of the Indochina Wars to their refugee aftermaths.  Her publications can be found in Adoption & Culture and forthcoming in L’Esprit Créateur as well as in the edited collections Redrawing the Historical Past and Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

HJT Howie Tam is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. He earned a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Dartmouth College and the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University. His articles have appeared in American Literature, the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. He is working on a book manuscript that studies forms of nationhood in diasporic Vietnamese literature published in the U.S. and France.