ABOUT NHU TRUONG
Her current book project, Authoritarian Expropriation: Reactive and Institutionalized Responsiveness in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia, specifically examines the endemic dispossession of land from villagers and the perplexing nature of why these regimes differ in their arbitration of social conflicts and citizen’s demands for social justice. Truong's research, teaching, and public scholarship demonstrate a long-standing commitment to Southeast Asia and East Asia, language acquisitions -- Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, and Khmer, and building connections across disciplinary boundaries. Truong was selected as Southeast Asia Research Group Fellow, a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia in the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University, and a New Faces in China Studies Fellow at Duke University. Prior to pursuing her doctoral studies, she completed an MPA in International Policy and Management at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, an MA in Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies, with a minor in Asian Studies at Kenyon College.
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Nhu Truong is an Assistant Professor in Southeast Asian Studies and Social Justice in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Truong holds a PhD in Political Science from McGill University, specializing in the study of authoritarian politics and social resistance in comparative perspective. Her work extricates the constitutive elements of authoritarianism that directly affect communities at the grassroots. She approaches this through careful conceptualization, comparative historical analysis, and theory-building, which are rooted in deep contextual knowledge, intensive fieldwork, and archival research.