Kelly Nguyen
Education
B.A. in Classics and in Archaeology from Stanford University in 2012
Ph.D. in Ancient History from Brown University in 2021
Areas of Interest
Histories of empires, forced displacement, and race and ethnicity in a global context; ethnic identity in the Roman world; postcolonial theory, queer of color critique, critical race theory and critical refugee studies
Profile
My research and teaching engages classical studies in a comparative manner to explore histories of empires, forced displacement, and race and ethnicity in a global context. I have published on ethnic identity and racial rhetoric in the Roman world, as well as on classical reception through the lenses of postcolonial theory, queer of color critique, critical race theory and critical refugee studies. My current book manuscript, Critical Classicality in Vietnam and the Diaspora (under contract with Oxford University Press), is the first major project to explore how Vietnamese intellectuals—both national and diasporic, from the French colonization era to contemporary times—have engaged with the Greco-Roman classical tradition for different liberatory purposes.
I recently launched a new community-engaged digital humanities project called the Refugee Material Culture Initiative that aims to digitally preserve art and artifacts made and/or used by refugees, create a free and accessible database of these digital outputs, and generate educational resources to teach about refugee histories. I teach an annual course in relation to this project on comparative refugee narratives, with a focus on Greco-Roman antiquity and contemporary Vietnamese history.
As a member of the inaugural cohort of the UCLA Mellon Data/Social Justice Curriculum Initiative, I split my teaching between Classics and the new Social Justice curriculum. I teach courses that globalize and decolonize classical studies, such as Asian and Asian American Classical, Classics and Social Justice, and Decolonizing Refugee Data from Rome to Vietnam.