Marguerite Nguyen studies 20th - 21st-century American and Asian American literature. She is author of America's Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire (Temple University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War (MELUS, 2016). Prior to Wesleyan, she spent time researching dynamics of race, migration, environment, and narrative form in Southeast Asian American cultures of Louisiana. Her next project, "Refugee Ecologies," is based on this work and interprets American literature as a fraught practice of worldbuilding in contexts of disaster and displacement, particularly as depicted by writers of color. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and National Humanities Center.