Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife (Duke University Press, 2012). She is also co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique on Southeast Asians in diaspora (Winter 2012).

With her second project on the obligations of beauty, she continues to pursue her scholarship through the frame of transnational feminist cultural studies, and in particular as an untangling of the liberal way of war that pledges “aid,” freedom, rights, movement, and other social goods. Nguyen is also co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007), and publishes on queer subcultures and punk feminisms.

Nguyen has published zines since 1991, including the compilation zine ...Race Riot. She is a former Punk Planet columnist and a Maximumrocknroll worker, and her zine writing is archived at thread & circuits. She is also co-author of the research blog on dress and beauty threadbared.

This site is still being updated with academic works and zines.