Vinh Nguyen

Professor, English & Cultural Studies

My teaching and research interests are in the areas of Asian diasporic literatures and cultures, critical refugee and migration studies, auto/biography, (auto)ethnography, film, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, decolonization and imperialism, global Anglophone literatures, and creative writing.

I’m the author of the speculative memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse (HarperCollins Canada | Counterpoint US, 2025), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and the Toronto Book Awards. My academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience (University of California Press, 2023) won Outstanding Achievement in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Shelly Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies from the American Studies Association. I’ve also co-edited two academic volumes Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023).

I’ve received several honours, including the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature, the Lambda Literary Fellowship in Nonfiction, and the Writers Trust Rising Stars Award.

I welcome supervisees interested in critical-creative methodologies and experimental research creation, especially those the push the boundaries of discipline, genre, and “aboutness.”

I’m currently at work on several projects: a queer historical novel, a study of refugee cinema, and a hybrid nonfiction book on food and mourning.

Find out more at: https://vinhnguyen.ca/