Nhu Truong
Position title: Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Social Justice | Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Email: Nhu.truong@wisc.edu
Website: Home department
Address:
1212 Van Hise Hall
Education
Ph.D in Political Science, McGill University, 2020
M.P.A in International Policy and Management, New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, 2012
M.A. in Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2009
B.A. in International Studies, Kenyon College, 2006
Biography
Nhu Truong is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Social Justice in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She researches the repressive-responsive parameters of autocracies and democracies, contentious politics and social movements, party and state formation, land politics, and political legitimation, with a comparative regional focus on Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. Her current book project, tentatively titled, When Autocracies Respond: Land Expropriation, Agrarian Resistance, and the State in Cambodia, China and Vietnam, specifically examines the endemic dispossession of land from villagers and the perplexing nature of why these regimes differ in their arbitration of social conflict and citizen’s demand for social justice. She pursues these research interests by employing comparative historical methods, archival research, ethnographic observation, and intensive fieldwork in Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, and Khmer. Her research has appeared in Democratization, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal of East Asian Studies, and edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press.
Before joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Truong has held fellowships from Stanford University as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia, and from Yale University as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council on Southeast Asian Studies. In recognition of her scholarship, she has been awarded the Young Southeast Asia Fellow by the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG), a New Faces in China Studies by Duke University, and a Senior Fellowship by the Center for Khmer Studies. She has been elected Program Chair of the Southeast Asian Politics Related Group of the American Political Science Association, and to the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, and a current editor in chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.