Cindy Anh Nguyen

Assistant Professor

Cindy Anh Nguyen is assistant professor with appointments in Information Studies department, Digital Humanities program, and Asian Languages & Culture at University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (UC Press, 2026) uncovers how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. Her transdisciplinary research examines the historical and socio-technical production of knowledge in Southeast Asia through libraries, encyclopedia, visual media, and language through feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches. Nguyen’s multifaceted digital humanities work bridges computation and critical data analysis as a commitment to global south cultural heritage and community engaged research. Her work has appeared in Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, the Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum, and numerous edited volumes on history and digital humanities. Nguyen is also a public scholar, educator, and community artist exploring themes of migration and memory. Follow her work at cindyanguyen.com and bibliotactics.com.

Departments

Department of Information Studies

Programs

Expertise

Titles and Positions

Assistant Professor, Department of Information Studies
Assistant Professor, Digital Humanities Program
Affiliate Faculty, Asian Languages and Culture
Faculty Advisory Committee, DataX
Convener, Critical Data Lab

Awards, Honors and Fellowships

2025 Council of American Overseas Research Centers – National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship – Cambodia
2024 Chancellor’s Arts Initiative Grant, UCLA
2022 Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Rare Book School
2022 The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
Research Development Grants for BIPOC Scholars
2021 University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
2021 Phyllis Dain Library History Best Dissertation Award – American Library Association
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
2019 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute – Colonial Experiences and their Legacies in Southeast Asia, East-West

Education

Ph.D., History, University of California, Berkeley
M.A., History, Michigan State University
B.A., History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Select Publications

Nguyen, Cindy Anh. Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam. Oakland: University of California Press, 2026
Theresa de Langis, Nicole Yow Wei, Tara Tran, and Cindy Anh Nguyen, “A&Q: Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia,” Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Volume 11, No. 1, Spring 2025
Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Critical Readings of a French Colonial Vietnamese Text: Reimagining Social Worlds through Visual-Textual Representations of Female Labor,” in DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History, edited by Spencer Keralis and Cait Coker (Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2024).
Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Feminist Decolonial Futures: Tactics of Teaching Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, No. 25.
Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Collecting through Absence: Fragmenting Vietnamese Refugee Archives,” Wasafiri, Routledge Taylor & Francis (2023) Volume 4, No. 116: 22-30.
Cindy Nguyen, “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Fragmented Collections, and Reading Publics, 1946-1958,” in Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920–1963, edited by Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), 164–85.
Anessa Petteruti, Cindy Nguyen, David H. Laidlaw, “Designing the Virtual Rosetta: A Tool for Exploring Historical Drawings in VR,” 6th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities “The Politics of Scale,” Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers VIS 2021, 24 October: 7-11, doi: 10.1109/VIS4DH53644.2021.00006
Cindy Nguyen, “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.
Cindy A. Nguyen, “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), 135-156.