Teaching Fellows

Victoria Nguyen is a social sciences teaching fellow with a joint appointment in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Department of Anthropology and. Situated at the intersection of urban anthropology, environmental studies, and social theory, her research explores the material, conceptual and social effects of mass urbanization. Focusing on China and its translocal connections, her scholarship tracks how ideals of the city are both “lived” and articulated in projects of environmental management, urban design, and modern development. Her current book project, Urban Interrupted, examines how culturally and historically specific ideas of the urban are being translated, measured, and authorized as objective national goals in post-Mao China. Drawing on extended fieldwork, it details the novel configurations of administration, environmental expertise, design, and discipline that work to continually redefine the urban and its constitutive Other in contemporary China. Her next project turns to the longstanding relationship between China and America’s late-industrial cities, investigating the intimate entanglements between urban invasive species, city planning, and state sovereignty, at a time of increasing environmental and economic precarity. She received her PhD in Anthropology in the summer of 2020.