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 Literary 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 Shelley 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.

Since 2021, I've been a nonfiction editor at the literary magazine The New Quarterly. With the anthropologist Jasmin Habib, I co-edit the book series "passages" for Wilfrid Laurier University Press. From 2021 - 2023, I served as a cultural consultant on the hit CBC sitcom Run the Burbs. In 2016, I was a historical consultant on a Heritage Minutes on Boat Refugees. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, I curated a film series, Flights: Vietnam on Film, for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Cinematheque. 

I regularly collaborate with the Critical Refugee + Migration Studies Network Canada. Before returning to McMaster, I taught at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo for a decade. 

I welcome supervisees broadly interested in critical-creative methodologies and experimental research creation, especially those that 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/