Research Areas

20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature and culture; diaspora and migration narratives, particularly of the Vietnamese diaspora; critical refugee studies; food and foodways; memory
 

Biography

I am a Ph.D. candidate in French, specializing in refugitude aesthetics, memory, care, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora.

My dissertation uncovers transdiasporic and intergenerational approaches to a politics of care in narratives of displacement, entangled in histories of colonialism and continuous migration flows in and out of Southeast Asia. Foregrounding refugee experiences and epistemologies, this project combines archival research and community oral histories with close readings of culinary encounters and tensions in diasporic Vietnamese literature, graphic novels, and film. This research has been generously supported by fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation (Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship) as well as UC Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Coming from a family of immigrants and refugees, I strongly believe in the critical power of “me-search” (cf. Nguyen 2014). I consider the intersections and tensions of my own identity (as Vietnamese/Korean/Chinese American) and personal histories as inextricable from a critical approach to literary and historical study as well as a driving force behind my research.

Prior to coming to Berkeley, I received my B.A. from Hamilton College in 2018 where I simultaneously completed individual honors theses for French and Literature, both exploring the relationship between language and racial/identity formation in Asian diaspora literature (Franco/Québécois-Vietnamese and Korean American respectively). I also spent a year in Paris through Hamilton in France, studying at l’Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle – Paris III, and another year in the Occitanie region of France as a high school assistant de langue through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).

When I am not poring over experimental literary aesthetics, I am experimenting in the kitchen, trying new restaurants in the Bay Area, or singing my heart out in karaoke with friends.

Selected Publications

Yeh, Alan T. ""J'écris contre": Linda Lê's Refugitude Aesthetics." L'Esprit Créateur, vol. 63 no. 4, 2023, p. 48-61. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2023.a919688.