Y Thien Nguyen is a Research Fellow at the US-Vietnam Research Center, the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2021. He specializes on historical-comparative sociology, state formation, the Cold War, migration and collective memory. His dissertation “When State Propaganda Becomes Social Knowledge: Legacies of the Southern Republic” (ProQuest Order No. 28264891) focuses on the political history of the Republic of Vietnam (1955-1975) and the origins, development, and legacies of Republican anti-communism. The dissertation contributes an in-depth socio-historical analysis of how a state-derived political ideology was constructed, disseminated, and transformed across the Vietnamese Republican era. Nguyen further traces how these ideas migrated, with Vietnamese refugee bodies, following the Fall of Saigon in 1975. He argues that ideas, forms of identification, and discourse of the Republican past had shaped (and continues to shape) the politics and identity of Vietnamese refugee communities overseas.
His research deploys diverse qualitative methods, including content analysis, interviews, oral histories, and archival materials. He is currently conducting a joint research historically comparing a number of Vietnamese American organizations which engages in transnational activism and homeland politics. His article “(Re)Making the South Vietnamese Past in America” is published in the Journal of Asian American Studies.