Cindy Anh Nguyen
Assistant Professor
Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyen is an assistant professor in the Information Studies Department and Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public (University of California Press, December 2025) uncovers how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. Her research questions examine the historical and socio-technical production of knowledge in Southeast Asia through libraries, encyclopedias, visual media, and language through feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches. 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.