Cindy A. Nguyen
Historian of Empire, Print Culture, Southeast Asia
Digital Humanities and Vietnam Studies Specialist
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
2021- University of California, San Diego
UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature and History departments
2019-2021 Brown University
Postdoctoral Fellow in History Department and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
RESEARCH MANUSCRIPTS
Bibliotactics: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958
Vietnamese Visual Texts: Pluralizing Narratives through Visual Encyclopedia
Pulau Bidong: Transient Communities and Landscapes of Vietnamese Refugee Life, 1975-2005
Distributing Revolution: Propaganda, Statistics, and Information in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975
EDUCATION
2013-2019 University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. in History
Primary Field in Southeast Asia
Second Field in Knowledge Systems: Classification & Colonial Knowledge
Outside Field in Digital Humanities & Data Science
2011-2013 Michigan State University, Master of Arts in History
2006-2010 University of California, Los Angeles, Bachelor of Arts in History and Southeast Asian Studies; Minors: Global Studies, Political Science
AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2022 Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Rare Book School, Junior Fellow
2022 The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Research Development Grants for BIPOC Scholars
2021 Phyllis Dain Library History Best Dissertation Award – American Library Association
2021- University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
2020 Pattana Kitiarsa Southeast Asia Council Prize, Association for Asian Studies, “The Social Life of the Hanoi Central Library: Reading Cultures & Public Space, 1919-1941”
2020 Center for Khmer Studies Senior Fellowship, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
2020 Brown Arts Initiative Research & Development Grant for Documentary Film on Refugee Exodus
2019 Vietnam Studies Group – Association for Asian Studies Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper
2019 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute – Colonial Experiences and their Legacies in Southeast Asia, East-West Institute, Honolulu
2018 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Writing Fellowship
2017 Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship – Vietnam & France
2016 Fulbright Institute of International Education US Student Fellowship – Vietnam
2016 École française d’Extrême-Orient Field Scholarship in the Hanoi Centre
2016 D. Kim History of Science in East Asia Fellowship
2014-2015 Digital Humanities at Berkeley Collaborative Research Award, Digital Humanities Fellow
2014, 2016 Institute for East Asian Studies Digital History Research Fellowship
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
2021 Book Chapter in Edited Volume: “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Fragmented Collections, and Reading Publics, 1946-1958,” in Building a Republican Nation in Postcolonial Vietnam, 1920-1963, Volume 1, edited by Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2023)
2021 Book Review: Review of Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975 by Olga Dror, Cambridge University Press, 2018. Journal of Vietnamese Studies, (2021) Volume 16, No. 1: 182-188. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2021.16.1.182
2021 Published Conference Proceedings: “Designing the Virtual Rosetta: A Tool for Exploring Historical Drawings in VR” by Anessa Petteruti, Cindy Nguyen, David H. Laidlaw, 6th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities “The Politics of Scale,” Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers VIS 2021, 24 October, pp. 7-11, doi: 10.1109/VIS4DH53644.2021.00006.
2020 Solo-Authored Research Article in Peer Reviewed Journal: “Reading Rules: The Symbolic and Social Spaces of Reading in the Hanoi Central Library, 1919-1941,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, (2020) Volume 15, No. 3: 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.3.1
2016 Translation (Vietnamese to English): “The Library of the French School of the Far East” by Ngô Thế Long, Thưviện Học viện Viễn Đông Bác cổ, Tạp chí Thông tin Khoa học xã hội, No.7, 2016. Translated by Cindy A. Nguyen.
2015 Book Chapter in Edited Volume: “A Xu/Sou for the Students: A Discourse Analysis of Vietnamese Student Migration to France in the Late Colonial Period” in The Question of Return: Leaving, Arriving, and Returning in an Age of Transnational Migration, ed. Michiel Baas, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015)
2014 Book Review: “The Cost of Progress,” of Luc Xi: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi by Shaun Kingsley Malarney, New Asia Books, International Institute of Asian Studies, (October 2014): http://www.newbooks.asia/review/cost-progress
INVITED TALKS
2022 “Breathing Life into Archival Research on Library History in Colonial Vietnam: Challenges and Opportunities,” Lecture, The Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 15 March
2022 “Virtual World Building in Digital Humanities,” Lecture, University of California San Diego Preparing Accomplished Transfers for the Humanities Program and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 24 February
2021 “International Library History Research,” Lecture, American Libraries Association, Library History Round Table, 12 June
2021 “The Politics of ‘Good Reading’: Libraries and the Public in Late Colonial Vietnam,” Lecture, Yale University, Council on Southeast Asian Studies, New Haven, CT, 7 April
2020 “Docupoetics and Intergenerational Memory: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives and the Language of Home,” Lecture, Artist Talk, and Film Screening, Yale University, Asian Diasporas Panel, New Haven, CT, 11 November
2020 “Translating Across Time and Space,” Lecture, Artist Talk, and Film Screening, Harvard University, Committee on Ethnicity, Rights, and Migration, Cambridge, MA, 21 February
2020 “Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina,” Lecture, Middlesex Community College, Asian Studies Development Program East-West Center, Bedford, MA, 11 February
2017 “Operationalizing Historical Questions: Datafying the Library of Congress Vietnam Collections,” Conference Organizer and Presenter, Texts as Data- Data as Texts Seminar and Workshop at Yonsei University, Seoul, 12 January – Led Lecture & Discussion
2016 “Lịch sử Thư viện Việt Nam 1887-1986: Phương pháp tiếp cận nghiên cứu của đại học Hoa kỳ” (History of Libraries in Vietnam: American Research Methods), Lecture, Vietnam National University (Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội – Trường Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn), Hanoi, Vietnam, 23 December
2016 “Lịch sử Thư viện Việt Nam 1887-1986” (A Survey of Libraries in Vietnam in the 20th Century) Lecture, Institute of Social Sciences Information (Viện thông tin khoa học xã hội), Hanoi, Vietnam, 4 November
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
2023 Panel Convener and Presenter, “The Decolonization of Libraries and Building Postcolonial Reading Publics in Saigon, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh, 1945-1965 on the panel “Global Documentation Flows: The Movement and Materiality of Information through Political Upheaval and its Aftermaths,” Global Asias 6 Conference, Pennsylvania State University, State College, 31 March-1 April
2023 “To Collect: The Decolonization of Libraries and Building Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Panel “History, Community and Memory: The Vietnamese Past in the Vietnamese American Present,” Association for Asian Studies, Boston, 17-19 March
2023 “Computing Texts and Counting Meaning on the Margins: Challenges and Possibilities of Natural Language Processing in Asian Digital Humanities,” Association for Asian Studies, Boston, 17-19 March
2022 Presenter, “’Misreading’ as a Theoretical and Historical Framework: The Case of Colonial Vietnam,” The Pasts and Futures of the Library Conference, California State University, Fullerton, 11-12 March
2021 Co-Presenter: “Designing the Virtual Rosetta: A Tool for Exploring Historical Drawings in VR” by Anessa Petteruti, Cindy Nguyen, David H. Laidlaw, 6th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities “The Politics of Scale,” Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers VIS 2021, 24 October
2020 Conference Organizer, Moderator, Presenter: “Archiving Power: Vietnamese Refugee Studies and the Politics of Memory,” Mapping Power and Precarity in Southeast Asian/American Studies: Gender, Labor, and Critical Refugee Studies Workshop and Panel, Brown University, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, 13 November
2020 Panel Convener and Presenter: “The Politics of ‘Good Reading’: Publishing, Libraries, and Propaganda in Colonial Vietnam,” Panel Organizer “Social Life of Print in Colonial Vietnam: From Cultural Economics to Politics of Information,” Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Boston, 19-22 March (Accepted)
2019 “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Republican Visions, and Reading Publics (1946-1958),” Workshop on Republican Vietnam, University of Oregon, Eugene 14-15 October
2019 “Misbehaviors: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Labor in the Hanoi and Saigon Library, 1858-1945,” EuroSEAS International Conference, Berlin, 10-13 September
2019 “Reading Culture: The Material and Social History of Libraries in Colonial Vietnam,” Panel on “The Concept of Culture in Vietnam,” Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Denver, 21-24 March
2018 “Technologies of Information: Libraries, Publishing, and Propaganda in Wartime Indochina (1908-1945),” Columbia University Wartime Asia Workshop, 5 October
2018 “Reading and Misreading: From Temple of European Knowledge to Public Space of Vietnamese Modernity and Social Life in the Central Library Hanoi, 1919-1941,” 13th Singapore Graduate Forum on Southeast Asia Studies, ARI, National University of Singapore, 23-27 July – Presentation
2015 “Invisible Authorship: New Perspectives on Translation and Colonial Texts,” Poster, Digital Humanities Faire, University of California, Berkeley, 8 April
TEACHING EXPERIENCE AND TEACHING AWARDS
Brown University, 2019-2021
Contested Histories of Colonial Indochina: Undergraduate seminar on history, culture, and politics of French colonial Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (Fall 2019, Fall 2020)
Virtual Reality and Visual Analysis Teaching Module and Collaboration with Multimedia Lab, Received Brown course development grant to apply digital humanities Angkor teaching module to courses in remote learning environments (Fall 2020)
Colonial Narratives and Visual Representation in Vietnam: Undergraduate independent study in department of Modern Culture & Media and History (Fall 2020)
Print and Power in Modern Southeast Asia: Undergraduate/graduate seminar on print culture and government legibility in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam (Spring 2020)
Digital Teaching Faculty Facilitator, Anchor Course Design Institute
Recruited as faculty facilitator to assist faculty in digital teaching and course design (Summer 2020, Fall 2020)
University of California, Berkeley, 2014-2016
Mao & Chinese Communism: Graduate Student Instructor of undergraduate course UC Berkeley (Spring 2015)
History of Vietnam: Graduate Student Instructor of undergraduate course UC Berkeley (Fall 2014)
University of California, Los Angeles, 2008-2011
Academic Peer Learning Supervisor & Facilitator, UCLA Division of Undergraduate Education Supervised 100 undergraduate tutors for campus-wide Peer Learning Tutoring Services for ESL, Math & Sciences, and Athletics academic support
Digital Pedagogy Lab, 2020
Faculty Group Leader and Participant, Received scholarship to bring a team of Brown undergraduates to workshop critical approaches to online and remote learning for the future
Independent Digital Humanities Advising, 2020
Advisor, Designed digital humanities curricula and project development of “Art of Dissent” visual analysis of Hong Kong protest art
TEACHING AREAS AND COURSES PREPARED TO TEACH
- Global Digital History: Critical Data and Design in the Study of Cultural Heritage
- Visual and Textual Analysis of the Past
- Data and the Humanities: Critiques, Methods, and Experimental Design in Digital Humanities
- Print and Power: Print Culture, Literature, and Politics of Knowledge in Modern Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia
- Colonial/Postcolonial History of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia: Culture, Power, Change
- Global History of the Vietnam/American War: Cultural Studies of Conflict and Diasporic Literature
- History of Southeast Asian Urbanism: Conceptualizing Space, Materiality, and Mobility
- History of Information in Southeast Asia: Orality, Documentation, and Forms of Knowledge
- Writing the Past: Archives, Letters, and Historical Documents Composition Course
- Institutions of Heritage: Theory and Practice of Libraries, Archives, and Museums
DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS
2020-Present Principal Investigator, “Vietnamese Visual Texts,” Content, visual, and material analysis of colonial era collaborative texts; Funded by Brown Connect Collaborative Sprint Awards
2019-Present Affiliated Faculty, “Virtual Angkor,” Digital teaching of virtual reality simulation of 13th century Angkor temple complex; Development of teaching module for Brown University
2016-2018 Co-Principal Investigator, “Deconstructing Libraries: A Dual Approach to Historical Research and Machine Learning” Library of Congress Data Science Project – Report
2014-2016 Co-Principal Investigator, “Vietnamese Intellectual Networks Database” , funded through Andrew W. Mellon – UC Berkeley Digital Humanities Fellowship
2014-2015 Research Project and Presenter, “On Examining a Peripheral Text: Henri Oger & Technique du Peuple Annamite”- Poster
2013 Presenter and Participant, “Visualizing Vietnamese Print Culture and Print Industry,” Digital History School, Umea University Sweden
2013 Visualization and Research Lead, “Detroit Digital” Cultural Heritage Informatics Field School, Michigan State University
UNIVERSITY WORK & ACADEMIC SERVICE
2021 Vietnamese Boat People Journeys Map, Digital Humanities Advisor
2021 Library History Round Table, American Library Association, Editor Search Committee
2020 Interdisciplinary Southeast Asia Studies Workshop, Director of faculty and graduate student workshop, successfully funded by Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
2020 Digital Teaching Faculty Facilitator, Anchor Course Design Institute at Brown University
Recruited as faculty facilitator to assist faculty in digital teaching and course design
2019-Present Curriculum and Programming Mentor, Southeast Asia Student Initiative at Brown University
Student led initiative to increase the teaching and research of Southeast Asia on campus
2019-Present Postdoctoral Fellow, Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University
Participant in weekly meetings to workshop research from scholars and students across campus
2016-2017 Working Group, École française d’Extrême-Orient, Hanoi Centre
Multi-lingual (French, Vietnamese, and English) research group with Professor Andrew Hardy
2013-2016 Co-Director and Member, Berkeley Digital Humanities Working Group
Directed Digital Humanities Working Group (2013-2016), Coordinated the cross campus and bay area Digital Humanities Faire at UC Berkeley (2015), NEH funded Digital Humanities Fellow at Berkeley (2014-2015), Participated in Bay area Digital Humanities workshops and events (present)
2014-2015 Digital History Coordinator, UC Berkeley History Department and Social Science D-Lab
2014-2015 Graduate Student Instructor, UC Berkeley History Department
2013-2014 Campus Digital Humanities Assistant, Research Information Technologies, UC Berkeley Developed campus-wide initiative for digital humanities research, teaching, and methodology
2012-2013 Research Assistant, Translator, and Area Specialist for MSU Vietnam Group Archive
Collaborative digitization project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Visualization Lead, “MSU Vietnam Group Archive Timeline”
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & ART ACCOLADES
2020-2021 Filmmaker, “Translating Across Time and Space: Rewriting the Landscape and Narrative of ‘Refugee’, funded by the Brown Arts Initiative Development Grant
2020 Art Publication and Art Exhibition, “Train/Xe lửa” and “Confessions of a Vietnamese Refugee” Publication in Pank Magazine Vietnamese Folio, forthcoming
Exhibition in the “Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Fall of Saigon (Oakland Asian Cultural Center and Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network)
2020 Invited Panelist, “Intergenerational Communication and Everyday Language,” Oakland Asian Cultural Center
2019 Short Film, “The Undeniable Force of Khó Khăn” film
Featured at Viet Film Festival (2019), semi-finalist for Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival (2020)
Published release in Diacritics.org, “This is for mẹ”, and AJAR Press
2018 Writer, If-Me.org mental health non-profit and open source project. Essay “An Asian American’s Language of Mental Health”
2018 Lecturer, “History & Memory of Vietnamese Refugees” Lecture at Pawcatuck Middle School, CT
2017 Art Publication, “Train/Xe lửa” Bi-lingual poetry on History, Memory, and Language in independent Vietnamese and global publisher Ajar Press, issue 5, song song || para||el, Fall
LANGUAGES & DIVERSE SKILLS
- Vietnamese: Native fluency in reading, speaking, advanced writing
- French: Advanced reading, intermediate speaking, writing
- Visual: Virtual Reality, 360 Video, Film Production, Photography
- Data & Databases: MySQL, Relational Databases, Open Refine, Text Analysis
- Text Analysis & Topic Modeling: Mallet, Natural Language Toolkit, Voyant
- Content Management Systems: Drupal, WordPress, Canvas, GitHub
- GIS:ArcGIS, QGIS
- Visualization: Tableau, Palladio, Voyant, Gephi, timeline.js
- Project Management, Digital Research Project Consulting, Startup and Organization Operations
Cindy A. Nguyen 