Cindy Nguyen
Assistant Professor
Dr. Cindy Nguyen is assistant professor in the Information Studies department and Digital Humanities program at University of California, Los Angeles. Her book manuscript, “Bibliotactics: The Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865–1958” reveals how the library reading room became a space of urban sociability, cultural imperialism, and self-directed education. She specializes in Southeast Asian print culture, digital humanities, critical data studies, and histories of the book and information. Nguyen is also a public scholar and community artist exploring themes of memory, translation, and migration. To learn more about her historical scholarship, teaching, and digital humanities work, see her website: cindyanguyen.com
Departments
Programs
Interests
Expertise
Awards, Honors and Fellowships
- 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
- Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Collecting through Absence: Fragmenting Vietnamese Refugee Archives,” Wasafiri, Taylor & Francis (in production)
- Cindy Nguyen, “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Fragmented Collections, and Reading Publics, 1946-1958,” in Building a Republican Nation in Postcolonial Vietnam, 1920-1963, Volume 1, edited by Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022)
- 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, pp. 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 Nguyen, “A Xu/Sou for the Students: A Discourse Analysis of Vietnamese Student Migration to France in the Late Colonial Period” in Transnational Migration and Asia: The Question of Return, ed. Michiel Baas, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 135-156.