Research Fellows

Duyen Bui 

Duyen Bui is a Research Fellow at the US-Vietnam Research Center, the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. She engages in scholarship focused on international relations, comparative politics, and social movements, particularly in the fields of Asia, Vietnam, and Vietnamese American studies. Her current research examines the strategies and tactics of transnational activism in the Vietnamese diaspora to analyze how nonstate actors contest for political power against the state. This project is a continuation of her dissertation, which argued that diasporic communities attempt to influence politics in their place of origin through three strategic action fields: homeland politics, long-distance politics, and international politics. 

Trinh M. Luu

Trinh M. Luu is a Research Fellow at the US-Vietnam Research Center, the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research spans much of 20th century Vietnam and the postwar diaspora in the United States and France. Her book manuscript, “Among the Divinities: Law, Literature, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” examines literary production and legal reform during Renovation (Đổi Mới). A chapter of her manuscript was published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. Luu’s research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the David L. Boren Fellowship Program, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, as well as the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley.  

In addition to her work on law and literature, Luu has an abiding interest in South Vietnam and its diaspora. As Research Fellow, she is co-editing with Tuong Vu a volume titled War and Society in Republican Vietnam: Agency and Legacy in the Diaspora. She is also leading a collaborative project to translate South Vietnamese fiction into English. 

Y Thien Nguyen

Y Thien Nguyen is a Research Fellow at the US-Vietnam Research Center, the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2021. He specializes on historical-comparative sociology, state formation, the Cold War, migration and collective memory. His dissertation “When State Propaganda Becomes Social Knowledge: Legacies of the Southern Republic” (ProQuest Order No. 28264891) focuses on the political history of the Republic of Vietnam (1955-1975) and the origins, development, and legacies of Republican anti-communism. The dissertation contributes an in-depth socio-historical analysis of how a state-derived political ideology was constructed, disseminated, and transformed across the Vietnamese Republican era. Nguyen further traces how these ideas migrated, with Vietnamese refugee bodies, following the Fall of Saigon in 1975. He argues that ideas, forms of identification, and discourse of the Republican past had shaped (and continues to shape) the politics and identity of Vietnamese refugee communities overseas.

His research deploys diverse qualitative methods, including content analysis, interviews, oral histories, and archival materials. He is currently conducting a joint research historically comparing a number of Vietnamese American organizations which engages in transnational activism and homeland politics. His article “(Re)Making the South Vietnamese Past in America” is published in the Journal of Asian American Studies.

Vinh Phu Pham

Vinh Phu Pham is a literary scholar with a background in Vietnamese Francophone and nineteenth-century Spanish peninsular literature. He received his BA and MA in Spanish language and literature from Florida Atlantic University, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University. Vinh has taught a variety of courses including Spanish language, travel capitalism, and contemporary art and has published articles relating to Vietnamese literature and culture. Currently he is a visiting lecturer at Fulbright University Vietnam and the English editor of the US-Vietnam Review.