Gender & Women's Studies

Gender & Women's Studies

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies

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Biography

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife (Duke University Press, 2012). She continues to understand her scholarship through the frame of transnational feminist cultural studies, and in particular as an untangling of the liberal way of war that pledges “aid,” freedom, rights, movement, and other social goods, with her following project on the obligations of beauty. 

She is also co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007), and co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions on Southeast Asians in diaspora (Winter 2012). She publishes also on queer subcultures, the politics of fashion, and punk feminisms. In 2012, she went on the first POC Zine Project/Race Riot! Tour to discuss and read from zines by people of color.

Specializations / Research Interest(s)

  • transnational feminist cultural studies
  • critical refugee studies
  • women of color feminisms and queer of color critique

Education

  • Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies, Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality
  • M.A., New York University, American Studies
  • B.A. University of California, Berkeley, Women's Studies

Courses

  • AAS 211 Asian Americans and the Arts
  • GWS 330 Bodies and Technologies in Popular Culture
  • GWS 350 Feminist Theory
  • GWS 460 Transnational Feminisms
  • GWS 485 The Politics of Fashion
  • GWS 550 Feminist Theories and Methods

Publications

Books

  • Nguyen, Mimi T. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Publication Photo

Book Contributions


  • Nguyen, Mimi T. "Afterward." Afterword. Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower. . Ed. Zack Furness. New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2012.

  • "It’s (Not) a White World: Looking for Race in Punk." White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. . London: Verso, 2011.

  • Nguyen, Mimi T. "Bruce Lee I Love You: Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Queer Superstardom of JJ Chinois." Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. . Ed. Mimi T. Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 271-304.

  • Nguyen, Mimi. "Thoughts on Afropunk." Youth Subcultures: Exploring Underground America. . New York: Longman, 2006.

  • "'In the arms of Pirates, Under the bodies of Sailors:' Diaspora, Desire, and Danger in Nguyen Tan Hoang's PIRATED!." Charlie Don't Surf: Four Vietnamese American Artists. . Vancouver: Centre A, 2005. 66-75.

  • Nguyen, Mimi T. ""Vietnam: Journal/Journey"." An Introduction to Women's Studies: Gender in a Transnational World, Second Edition. . Comp. Caren Kaplan. Ed. Inderpal Grewal. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. 435-439.

  • Nguyen, Mimi. "Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space." AsianAmerica.net. . Ed. Rachel Lee and Sau-Ling Wong. New York: Routledge Press, 2003. 281-305.

  • Nguyen, Mimi. "Asiatic Geekgirl Agitprop from Paper to Pixels." Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life. . Ed. Thuy Linh Tu and Alondra Nelson. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 177-190.

Edited Books


  • Nguyen, Mimi T., and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Journal Articles

  • Nguyen, Mimi T. ""The Diasporic Erotic: Love, Loss, and the Copy"." Camera Obscura (2012): NP.
  • Nguyen, Mimi T. "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in the War on Terror." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26.2 (2011): 359-383.

Special Issues of a Journal

  • Nguyen, Mimi T. ""Race, Riot Grrrl, Revival"." Punk Anteriors: Genealogy, Performance, Theory. Spec. iss. of Women & Performance 22.2 (2012): NP.
  • Ngo, Fiona I., Mimi T. Nguyen, and Mariam B. Lam. ""Guest Editors' Introduction"." "Southeast Asian American Studies". Spec. iss. of positions: east asian cultures critique 20.3 (2012): 671-684.
  • Nguyen, Mimi T. "Operation Homecoming: Memory, History, and the Production of the Vietnamese Refugee in U.S. National and Diasporic Imaginaries." Topographies of Race and Gender: Mapping Cultural Representations, Part 2. Spec. iss. of Annals of Scholarship 18.2-3 (2009): 115-149.