Marguerite Nguyen studies 20th - 21st-century American and Asian American literature. She is author of America's Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire (Temple University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War (MELUS, 2016). Prior to Wesleyan, she spent time in New Orleans researching relationships among race, disaster, imperialism, and narrative form. Her next project, "Refugee Ecologies," is based on this work and interprets American literature as a body of texts about worldbuilding in the face of forced displacement and environmental harm.