华体会

I am a writer and art historian specializing in twentieth-century U.S. visual culture, post-WWII abstract painting, the history of photography, and the visual and literary cultures of 20th century Việt Nam. I received my Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University (2019) and M.A. in History from Yale University (2012). I have native-level fluency in Vietnamese from fifteen years of study, five years of living in Hà Nội, a Fulbright research fellowship in 2007, and publishing in Vietnamese.

 

My research focuses on the confluence of trauma and memory, dreams and poesis in works of art. I write about visual histories of settler colonial violence with an acute focus on picturing the American war in Vietnam. More broadly, I am interested in the strange relationship between Art and Life. In this way, the process of ekphrasis—descriptive analysis and close-looking at images—is central to my practice. Phenomenology, critical theory, and the role of metaphor guide my writing and archival practice. What is the past and how do we approximate it? How do works of art reveal (and at times even conceal) both truths and secrets about history?

 

At Stanford, my dissertation focused on a single photograph from the morning of June 11, 1963, showing the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức on fire. His self-immolation on the streets of Sài Gòn that summer morning was captured by Associated Press correspondent and American journalist Malcolm Browne. Earlier this year I completed an article on the fractured visual culture of 1840s America. Entitled Slabs of White: Panoramic Whales and Photographic Guano in the Mid-19th Century. The essay will appear in the upcoming spring edition of the transmedia journal, The Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies (PIMS v.1, 2025) Yearbook. Other recent academic work includes an essay on the contemporary Vietnamese-American artist Đỉnh Q. Lê published in Vietnam: Environment and Narrative (Palgrave MacMillan). ‘Ghosts of American Gothic in True Detective’ will appear in When American Television Became American Literature (Brill, Summer 2025).