Trung PQ Nguyen (he/him) is a University of California President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (UC PPFP) in the Department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced.

His research examines the historical and emergent relationships between visual culture, permanent war, labor, value, mediation, gender, and racial capitalism.

He is currently working on a book manuscript, Loss in Perpetuity: Necrovalue, Iterative Vietnam, and the Racial Mediation of Permanent War, which examines how loss gets disciplined and mobilized for counterinsurgent purposes by the state apparatuses of permanent war. Examining photomagazines, film, newspaper, and other indexes of the visual, this book examines comparative racial subject formation in the context of racial capitalism, war-making, theories of value, and death through the Vietnamese figure. Loss in Perpetuity identifies how the racialized, gendered refugee has been used to create specific and new forms of value extraction out of loss and displacement. In turn, this book explores how Vietnam and Vietnamese refugees are deployed as the ideal object lesson of state-sponsored, premature loss, and thus used to reinstate its structure of violence’s management in other episodes of empire’s mass displacements — Central America, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond.

He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness, with designated emphases in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Before this, he received an M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles in Asian American Studies, with a concentration in Gender Studies, and a B.A. in Asian American Studies at UCLA.

He is also an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies at San Jose State University (on leave). Previously, he was the Managing Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies Journal. He was a former Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Scholar-In-Residence with the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley.