Cindy Nguyen
Assistant Professor
Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles with appointments in Information Studies, Digital Humanities Program, and Asian Languages & Culture. Her first book, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2026) uncovers how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. Her transdisciplinary research examines the historical and socio-technical production of knowledge in Southeast Asia through libraries, encyclopedia, visual media, and language through feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches. Her work has appeared in Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, the Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum, and numerous edited volumes on history and digital humanities. She is the founder of Culture Futures Rest Lab which explores cultural and computational questions of interpretation and context by centering global south codesign and multivocal knowledge making. She received her Ph.D. in history at University of California, Berkeley and her multidimensional research has been recognized by the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, American Libraries Association, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Education
- Ph.D., History, University of California, Berkeley
- M.A., History, Michigan State University
- B.A., History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Select Publications
- Nguyen, Cindy Anh. Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam. Oakland: University of California Press, 2026
- Theresa de Langis, Nicole Yow Wei, Tara Tran, and Cindy Anh Nguyen, “A&Q: Feminist Trouble in Southeast Asia,” Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Volume 11, No. 1, Spring 2025
- Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Critical Readings of a French Colonial Vietnamese Text: Reimagining Social Worlds through Visual-Textual Representations of Female Labor,” in DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History, edited by Spencer Keralis and Cait Coker (Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2024).
- Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Feminist Decolonial Futures: Tactics of Teaching Digital Humanities,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, No. 25.
- Cindy Anh Nguyen, “Collecting through Absence: Fragmenting Vietnamese Refugee Archives,” Wasafiri, Routledge Taylor & Francis (2023) Volume 4, No. 116: 22-30.
- Cindy Nguyen, “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Fragmented Collections, and Reading Publics, 1946-1958,” in Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920–1963, edited by Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), 164–85.
- Anessa Petteruti, Cindy Nguyen, David H. Laidlaw, “Designing the Virtual Rosetta: A Tool for Exploring Historical Drawings in VR,” 6th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities “The Politics of Scale,” Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers VIS 2021, 24 October: 7-11
- Cindy Nguyen, “Reading Rules: The Symbolic and Social Spaces of Reading in the Hanoi Central Library, 1919-1941,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, (2020) Volume 15, No. 3: 1-35.
- Cindy A. Nguyen, “A Xu/Sou for the Students: A Discourse Analysis of Vietnamese Student Migration to France in the Late Colonial Period” in The Question of Return: Leaving, Arriving, and Returning in an Age of Transnational Migration, ed. Michiel Baas, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 135-156.