Teaching – Cindy A. Nguyen

[TEACHING] On Digital Teaching During and After COVID-19

On November 9, 2020 I was invited to speak on the topic of digital teaching as part of the History Department, Center for Digital Scholarship, and 21st Century PhD Series at Brown University. The talk was well attended on Zoom from faculty, staff, and students from all over campus.

I talk through concrete activities, tools, and materials on remote digital teaching for history seminars. Drawing from my experience in critical digital pedagogy, inclusive design, and digital humanities, I share three guiding design principles: 1) variation of modality, 2) time/energy management, and 3) built in reflection and explain how I build in these principles into the class structure and assignments. The session concludes with time for Q&A and group discussion of challenges and experiences teaching during COVID.

Video Recording of Zoom Talk

Translating Across Time and Space: Film Screening, Artist Talk, and Creative Translation Activity at Harvard

I was invited to speak at an innovative event on translation and creative expression organized by the scholar Catherine H. Nguyen from the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University. Together with poet-scholar Quan Tran, we shared our scholarship and arts practice. I spoke about my scholarly research and its intersections with artistic expression and personal history. It was a refreshing and radical opportunity to speak honestly about my ‘historian-artist’ identity and diverse body of work–from research essays and teaching on Vietnamese history to film-poetry on translation and feminist performance art.

Continue reading “Translating Across Time and Space: Film Screening, Artist Talk, and Creative Translation Activity at Harvard”

Why Study the History of Colonial Indochina? Talk at Middlesex Community College 2020

I recently delivered a talk to 150 college students at Middlesex college through the Asian Studies Development Program. I was encouraged to prepare a talk which spoke to diverse students who might not have a background on Asian history. In preparing for the talk, I took a long time reflecting on the simple question, “Why study the history of colonial Indochina.” In the talk I explain three reasons:

It is important.
I am constantly learning and unlearning.
It is hard.

Continue reading “Why Study the History of Colonial Indochina? Talk at Middlesex Community College 2020”

[TEACHING] Virtual Reality Module: Analyzing Representations of Angkor

This is a teaching module I designed for my course, “Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina” at Brown University, Fall 2019. [See below for full teaching module or Download Teaching Module Update: Remote Virtual Revised version below or Download Remote Teaching Module] I connected with an ambitious, award winning project “Virtual Angkor” which brings the 13th century Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life through virtual reality and 3D simulation. Led by the talented team of Tom Chandler, Adam Clulow, Bernard Keo, Mike Yeates, and Martin Polkinghorne (SensiLab, Monash University, UT Austin, Flinders University), Virtual Angkor allows students to experience and pose questions about Angkor’s social life, trade networks, structure of power and kingship, as well as architectural layout.

Continue reading “[TEACHING] Virtual Reality Module: Analyzing Representations of Angkor”

[SYLLABUS] Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina

History 1978D – Fall 2019

Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina: Culture, Power, Change

Instructor: Dr. Cindy Nguyen, History Postdoctoral Fellow

E-mail: Cindy_Nguyen@brown.edu

Course Description

This seminar explores the history of French colonial Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) from 1858 to 1945. Challenging Euro-centric narratives of colonialism, we will critically analyze the colonial encounter as complex exchanges, geographically diverse, and socially uneven. We will examine the mechanisms and limitations of the colonial state, capitalism, administration and institutions, and science and technology (maps, communications, transportation, medicine). Rather than position colonialism as an external agent of change, this seminar dedicates attention to local agency, and social and cultural transformations. We will focus on the creative production of new ideas, print media, and urban and religious communities especially in 1920s to 1940s Hanoi, Saigon, and Phnom Penh. By reading primary sources, we will consider how historical actors experienced and understood colonialism and social transformation. Key historical and theoretical debates addressed include the production and legacies of colonial knowledge, construction of modernity and civilization, development of civil societies, transformations of religious communities, and articulations of identities around gender, class, revolution, and nation. The final session will consider the legacies of colonialism on language, race, nationalism, and identity. A close analysis of French colonial Indochina will serve as a framework for a cultural and politically situated history of empire in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Continue reading “[SYLLABUS] Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina”

Instructional Technology: What’s Markers Got to Do With It?

This past November 2014 I delivered a brief 5 minute talk for my Graduate Student Instructor pedagogy course on instructional technology. It was the first time I was tasked with speaking concisely and convincingly about a topic that I am extremely passionate about (and can go days on end speaking and debating about technology in the classroom). After weeks of agonizing over how to win over all my peers with shiny digital things, eye opening new media theory, and youtube clips of cats, I decided to keep it simple and personal.