I am a. Nguyen
I am interested in the literary studies of science, food literature, expertise, the scientification of food writing and knowledge production, the practice of citations, reading as a serious method, and narrativizing inclusivity. I use food as a metaphor and object of study to think through these areas.
Co-creator + co-moderator of Literary Imagination in Science, Technology, and Society (2021-2022) https://www.cells.uni-hannover.de/en/speakerseries/
Co-creator + co-moderator of (Techno)Science Beyond the Nation-State (2022-2023)
Book
Paperwork & Borders: A Marriage. Alien Buddha Press, 2022.
Pieces
"An American Study." Roi Fainéant, April 2, 2023.
"See You Again." Spellbinder, Winter 2023.
"Measuring the Present Past." diaCritics, November 30, 2022.
"Dinkelmehl 630." Gastropoda, July 24, 2022.
"For Children Who Translate." Cutleaf, July 7, 2022.
"Sprechen Sie Vietnamesisch?" diaCRITICS, May 4, 2022.
"'Citizen Science'/'Science Citizen' At the Table: Dead Grammars and a Citational Lesson." The Conjuncture, February 19, 2022.
"Narrativizing Injustice Through Fiction." Art/Research International, Vol. 6, No. 1 - Fiction as Research: Writing Beyond the Boundary Lines, 2021.
"Shelves of Books, Piles of Books, References and Lists of Books as Performances of Metrics and Expertise." WritingThreeSixty: Journal of Research and Creative Texts, Vol. 6, Issue 1 - Lockdown Special Issue, 2020.
"Locating the State in the Restaurant." STS in Crisis, issue 1 - Pandemic, 2020.
"The Bread Did Not Rise." The Dirty Spoon, July 3, 2020.
"Tastes We've Forgotten." Compound Butter, issue 12, 2019.
"I Baked You a Cake." Dear Lois, issue 2, 2019.
"Birdman." The Dirty Spoon, October 4, 2019.
"Fragmented Citations From My Mother." So Fi Zine #5, pp. 29-34, June 2019.
"Against Nature." Compound Butter, issue 11, 2019.
"The Best Bowl of Pho." Crust, issue 1, 2019.
"Serving Pizza to the Buddha." Compound Butter, issue 10, 2018.
"Absence." Peddler online, February 20, 2018.
Critical Literary Consumption podcast
(February 16, 2023) "How Do the Living Come Back to Life?" - interview with Morgan Talty
(February 2, 2023) "Symmetry/Asymmetry of Language and Translation - interview with Su Cho
(January 19, 2023) "Untangling 'Trauma, Tresses & Truth'" - interview with Lyzette Wanzer
(January 3, 2023) "'Sonic Memories' and Silences" - interview with Cija Jefferson
(December 9, 2022) "An American Education Through Illness and Nourishment" - interview with Dure Aziz Amna
(November 21, 2022) "Black German Studies and Transnational Collectivity" - interview with Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil
(November 7, 2022) "Translation As Literary (Co)Creation" - interview with Nguyễn An Lý
(October 13, 2022) "Afro-Brazilian Media and Antiracist Visual Politics" - interview with Dr. Reighan Gillam
(September 1, 2022) "Mapping As Revision of Life Stories" - interview with Belinda Huijuan Tang
(August 8, 2022) "Poetry, Migrancy, and Domestic Life" - interview with Eileen Chong
(July 20, 2022) "(Dis-)Orientalism in the Academy" - interview with Elaine Hsieh Chou
(July 8, 2022) "Mythologies As Communally Owned Stories" - interview with K-Ming Chang
(June 27, 2022) "'The Body as a Series of Questions'" - interview with Susan Nguyen
(June 16, 2022) "Anti-Colonial Practices as Research Methods" - interview with Dr. Max Liboiron
(June 1, 2022) "Unreliable Narrators, Knowing und Unknowing" - interview with Soon Wiley
(May 23, 2022) "Indigenous Internationalism, Indigenous Futures" - interview with Dr. Nick Estes
(May 3, 2022) "Reclamation Project: A Preview of Enjoy Me Among My Ruins" - interview with Juniper Fitzgerald
(April 22, 2022) "Countering the Borderlands for New Origin Stories" - interview with Ariana Brown
(April 7, 2022) "Absences and Things Left Unsaid" - interview with Jennifer Huang
(March 30, 2022) "The Concept of a Person and Care Work in Undocumented Motherhood" - interview with Dr. Elizabeth Farfán-Santos
(March 15, 2022) "Craft and Life Writing: On Work, the Model Minority Myth, and Covid" - interview with Weike Wang
(March 4, 2022) "Diasporic Languages of Migration, Food, Nature, and Colonial Histories" - interview with Nina Mingya Powles
(February 21, 2022) "Thinking Across Texts, Thinking Across (Inter)disciplines" - interview with Dr. Katherine McKittrick
(January 24, 2022) "Poetic Lab Notebooks and the Artistic Lives of Scientists" - interview with poet Dr. Jenny Qi
(December 28, 2021) "Fever Poems: Subconscious, Poetic Experimentation" - interview with poet Kelli Stevens Kane
(December 7, 2021) "Writing Intergenerational Trauma Through Food Memoir" - interview with Grace M. Cho
(November 18, 2021) "Writing About Food: Somewhere Between 'Theorizing and Imagining'" - interview with Sun Yung Shin, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Roy G. Guzmán)
(October 30, 2021) "Empiricism, Collaborative Research, and Accountability" - interview with Dr. Jelani Ince
(August 5, 2021) "Reflections on Racialized Organizations in Society" - interview with Dr. Victor Ray.
(July 13, 2021) "Reclaiming Language, Reclaiming the Body" - interview with poet and journalist Khalisa Rae.
(June 21, 2021) "Traveling Across Concepts, Countries, and Kitchens" - interview with author Ming-Cheau Lin.
(May 24, 2021) "Beyond Carceral Imaginaries and Logics" - interview with Dr. Tamara K. Nopper.
(May 7, 2021) "Disordered Science (Studies) in Society" - interview with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.
(April 5, 2021) "Nuance as Antithetical to Binaries" - interview with author Deesha Philyaw.
(March 15, 2021) "Narratives of Empire + Inheritance" - interview with author Asako Serizawa.
(February 18, 2021) "The Social World of the Book Review" - interview with Dr. Phillipa Chong.
(January 22, 2021) "The Matter We Call Food" - interview with Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins.
(December 17, 2020) "Book Reviews as Dialogue" - interview with Dr. Rosemary Deller, book review editor of LSE Review of Books.
(November 18, 2020) "Affect and Other Turns" - interview with Dr. Ashley Barnwell.
(September 30, 2020) "Abundance and Revision" - interview with author and professor Kiese Laymon.
Book Reviews
(2022) "Complaint!" by Sara Ahmed, Duke University Press. London School of Economic Review of Books.
(2022) "Joan Works, Joan Grieves, Joan Is Okay (During Covid)", by Weike Wang, Random House New York. SoapberryReview.
(2021) "Lessons From Plants", by Beronda L. Montgomery, Harvard University Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2021) "Dear Science and Other Stories", by Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2021) "The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights From the Frontiers of Food", by Vaughn Tan, Columbia University Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2020) "Critical Affect: The Politics of Method", by Ashley Barnwell, Edinburgh University Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2020) "Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat by Marion Nestle, A Pinch of Culinary Science: Boiling an Egg Inside Out and Other Kitchen Tales by Anu Inkeri Hopia and Erik Fooladi", Food, Culture & Society.
(2019) "Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food", edited by Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel MacQuarrie, Victoria N. Millious, and Elaine M. Power, Fordham University Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2019) "Can Science Make Sense of Life?", by Sheila Jasanoff, Polity. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2019) "Critiquing Food and Health in a Technical Democracy," Information, Communication, and Society (review of Digital Food Activism and Digital Sociology).
(2019) "Making Taste Public: Ethnographies of Food and the Senses," edited by Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund, Bloomsbury Academic. Food, Culture & Society.
(2018) "The Book," by Amaranth Borsuk, MIT Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2018) "Food and Femininity," by Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston, Bloomsbury Academic. CuiZine.
(2018) "Economic Science Fictions," edited by William Davies, Goldsmiths Press. London School of Economics Review of Books.
(2018) "Technology and the Future of Work: The Impact on Labour Markets and Welfare States," by Bent Greve, Edward Elgar Publishing. Information, Communication, and Society.
(2018) "Critical Studies of Innovation: Alternative Approaches to the Pro-Innovation Bias," edited by Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck, Edward Elgar Publishing. Information, Communication, and Society.
(2017) "Communities and Networks: Using Social Network Analysis to Rethink Urban Community Studies, " by Katherine Giuffre, Polity Press. Information, Communication, and Society Reviews.
Talks
Invited
2020
"The Disappearing Restaurant: Between Justice and the State." Guest Lecture for Graduate Course, Food and Race, Boston University, September 30.
2016
"Consuming Knowledge: On the Possibility of Food Writing." Emerging Scholar Talk for the Center for the Study of Early Asian and Middle Eastern Musics, History Seminar - Texts and Transmissions: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, University of Arkansas, October 6.
Conference
2020
"Locating the State in the Restaurant." GRiSTS - Submerged Futures: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Forgetting, Harvard University, September 4-5.
2019
"Tasting Technoscience: The Language of the Kitchen in Silicon Valley." Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) - Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations, New Orleans, LA, September 4-7.
"How To Be an [Academic] [Food] Writer." Interface 2019: (Un)bound: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, Carleton University, May 3-4.
2018
"Post-Truth Academia: Towards an Understanding of Subjectivity and Personal Knowledge." Binocular Conference: Chimerizations, York University, May 18-19.
"How We Envision Saving Science Through Food." Renouncing the Ivory Tower: The Decolonization of Anthropology and Sociology, Concordia University, March 22-24.
"Hierarchies of Knowledge: From Food Writing to Understanding Food Through Science." Matters of Fact: 20th Annual Graduate Student Conference, Presented by Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies, Theory and Criticism at Western University, March 15-17.
"What Vending Machines and Self-Checkout Have Taught Us About AI." Reformatting the World: HUGSA Conference at York University, February 23-24.
2017
"Political Fermentation: Displacing Knowledge from the Kitchen to the Lab and Its Return to the Kitchen." Leavening the Conversation: Intersections of Food, Fermentation, and Feminism, Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University, September 30-October 1.
"Voting for Robots With Your Fork and Wallet: The Neoliberal Language of Labor and Consumer Choice." Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) - STS (In)Sensibilities, Boston, MA, Aug 30-Sept 2.
"The Food (and Science) of the Future: A Technoscientific Genealogy of Soylent." Science in Public, the 11th Annual Science in Public Conference: Science, Technology, and Humanity, University of Sheffield, July 10-12.
"Voting for Robots With Your Fork and Wallet: The Neoliberal Language of Labor and Consumer Choice." AFHVS/ASFS Annual Meeting and Conference - \#oxyfood17, Occidental College, June 14-17.
"Consuming Knowledge: On the Possibility of Food Writing." Stop Making Sense: A Conversation Between Sensory and Social Science About Food and Drink, Chemical Heritage Foundation, March 10.
2016
"The Food (and Science) of the Future: A Technoscientific Genealogy of Soylent". Sixth International Conference on Food Studies, University of Berkeley, October 12-13.
"Food Experts and Civic Epistemologies: Making Sense of Nutrition and Science in Healthy Eating Literature”. ASFS/AFHVS/CAFS Annual Meeting and Conference - Scarborough Fare: Global Foodways and Local Foods in a Transnational City, University of Toronto Scarborough, June 22-25.
2015
"The Meaning of Food Writing: Food Language and Personal Knowledge in Use". Fifth International Conference on Food Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, September 18-19.