Marguerite Nguyen studies 20th - 21st-century American literature, specializing in the politics and aesthetics of Asian American literature, refugee contexts, and literary history. She is author of America's Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire (forthcoming, Temple University Press) and co-editor of Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War (MELUS, 2016). Prior to Wesleyan, she spent time in New Orleans researching Vietnamese Americans pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina to understand intersections of race, place, citizenship, and literary form. Her next project, tentatively titled Refugee Ecologies, is based on this work. It contributes to the field of critical refugee studies by offering ecocritical readings of refugee aesthetics.