Cindy Anh Nguyen (she/her) is an artist-historian among other hyphenations, working between fields of global Southeast Asian history, digital public history, library and information studies. She is currently an assistant professor in the Information Studies department and Digital Humanities Program at University of California, Los Angeles and specializes in Southeast Asian print culture and history of knowledge and information. Her book manuscript, “Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam, 1917–1958” uncovers the how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. 

 

Nguyen bridges academia and the public through her multimedia arts practice, multilingual poetry, and community platforms. Her body of work include the experimental film “The Undeniable Force of Khó Khăn” (screened at Viet Film Festival, Harvard, Yale University, semi-finalist for Flickers International Film Festival), mixed-media publications in Wasafiri, Ajar Press, Diacritics, and exhibitions such as “Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora” curated by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. She is the cofounder of Troubling Narratives, a global digital public research collective committed to work through the methods and ethics of Southeast Asian studies through feminist and decolonial practices. Her arts and scholarship interweave the personal and political, moving between languages of expression (Vietnamese and English) and across disciplinary borders to meditate upon themes of knowledge formation, refugee memory, and translation. She is committed to building inclusive spaces for intergenerational communication and experimental co-creation, dreaming up ways to empower through language, self-expression, and community health.