Scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora and community archives receives Society of Hellman Fellows Award and social impact grant from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement.
Thuy Vo Dang, UCLA assistant professor of information studies, has been honored with two UCLA research awards, in recognition for her research on the Vietnamese diaspora and her work with community archives.
Professor Vo Dang has received the 2024-25 Society of Hellman Fellows Award, which provides support and encouragement for the research of assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and the UCLA Professional Schools. The fellowship will enable her research on the British Vietnamese diaspora through community archiving and oral history.
With her project titled, “Vietnamese Diaspora in the UK: oral history and archival reciprocity for community archives,” Vo Dang will explore the Vietnamese British experience through the records of the An Viet Foundation, the largest known archives of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United Kingdom. Using her expertise in Vietnamese diaspora history and culture, Professor Vo Dang will advise the stewards of this community archives in description and activation of these historic materials, which are housed at the Hackney Archives in East London.
“I hope that by amplifying the An Viet Foundation archives and the important work of its community stewards, my research might generate knowledge on reciprocal and responsive ways to preserve and activate refugee and diaspora cultural memory,” she says.
In addition, Professor Vo Dang serves as principal investigator on an exploratory Social Impact Collaborative grant from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, with co-PI Thu-Huong Nguyen-vo, UCLA professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Their project, “Enhancing Equity in Public Library Services through Vietnamese Language and Cultural Resources,” will bring together the Los Angeles Public Library, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and an informal group of volunteers called the Viet StoryTime Club, in order to create and disseminate early childhood learning resources in Vietnamese language and culture, leading to resource guides, translated works, recorded story times, and toolkits for the Vietnamese diaspora community.
“This exploratory grant is such an innovative way to foster cross-departmental and university-community partnerships,” says Professor Vo Dang. “I hope that our collective’s work this year will clearly demonstrate the impact of investment in slow and exploratory conversations. And, of course, we are creating and disseminating community-centered resources for public libraries to use to engage with underserved groups.”
Portrait by Jaeden Taylor
Above: Thuy Vo Dang, UCLA assistant professor of information studies, visited the Hackney Archives in London to view the records of the An Viet Foundation, the largest known archives of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United Kingdom. Photo by Diana Le