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Volume IV, No. 1/November 2001
Joiner Center Names New Rockefeller Fellows
Seven fellows will participate in the Rockefeller Foundation program for the study of the Vietnamese diaspora during the 2001-02 academic year.
The selected fellows will explore philosophical, literary, historical, educational and journalistic expressions of the diasporic Vietnamese community over the last quarter century.
Karin Aguilar-San Juan is a sociologist whose project has a local focus, a study of the foundation of Boston’s Vietnamese American community. Boston has one of the largest Vietnamese American communities in the country and Aguilar-San Juan has done extensive research on the topic. In addition to her research on Boston, she has studied the Vietnamese American community in Orange County, California.
A literary scholar, Dang Tien, will examine Vietnamese overseas poetry of the last 25 years, 1975-2000. Tien, who is a French scholar at the University of Aix-en-Provence, has focused on Vietnamese poets in his research and on literature emanating from the south.
Do Quyen will conduct a series of interviews with members of the Vietnamese overseas community and record their impressions of life outside their native land. A contributor to numerous literary publications and the founder of three journals, he is a former resident of Germany and now resides in Canada.
A philosophical inquiry is the subject of Henry Nguyen Huu Liem’s research. A former editor and publisher of TRIET: A Vietnamese Journal of Philosophy and Ideas and a former deputy district attorney, he has been active in the Vietnamese-American community in California. His topic will be "The Prescriptive Language of the New Identities: A Philosophical Investigation."
A young scholar, Nguyen Thi Thanh received a doctorate in education from Harvard in 2000 and, as a Rockefeller Fellow, will research the topic "Where Should We Go from Here: How We Can Preserve the Traditional Order in the Family and in Society, Yet Let Our Children Have Room for Critical and Creative Thinking". She has been an adjunct faculty member at UMass Boston and focused her doctoral dissertation on the differential effects of a multiple intelligences curriculum on student performance.
Ta Chi Dai Truong is a historian whose Rockefeller proposal is "Vietnamese History Through A Vietnamese Lens: A Different Perspective." He has numerous publications on Vietnamese history, including an account of the Vietnamese civil war in 1802.
Trin Yarborough, a journalist, is conducting research to finish a non-fiction narrative account of the more than 30,000 Vietnamese Amerasians who came to the United States as teenagers and young adults between 1988 and 1994. She has been the director of communications for Oxfam America and the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. The producer of the documentary film, "Hunger as a Weapon: The U.S. Aid Embargo," she has been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly and Amsterdam’s NRC.
The Rockefeller Program collaborative is headed by the William Joiner Center and includes the Asian American Studies Program, the East Asian Studies Program, the Institute for Asian American Studies, the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth and the graduate College of Education, all situated at UMass Boston.
