Kelly Nguyen

Born in Vietnam and raised in Orange County’s Little Saigon, I am delighted to return to SoCal and join the Department of Classics at UCLA. I received my B.A. in Classics and in Archaeology from Stanford University, and after a few stints in the legal, nonprofit, and tech worlds, I returned to academia and completed my Ph.D. in Ancient History from Brown University. I was a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Rhetoric at UC – Berkeley, and most recently, I was an inaugural IDEAL Provostial Postdoctoral Fellow for studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford University.

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. My current book manuscript 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 in their fight for liberation (under contract with Oxford University Press, Classical Presences series). I have published on ethnic identity in the Roman world and on classical reception through the lenses of postcolonial theory, queer of color critique, critical race theory and critical refugee studies.

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 Reception and Classics and Social Justice.