Vivian Truong
Assistant Professor
History
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Vivian Truong is a community-engaged historian whose research and teaching interests include Asian American, urban, and social movement history. Her current research project examines Asian American and multiracial movements against police violence in late 20th-century New York City. Based on oral histories and newly recovered archival sources, this project examines cases including the 1995 police killing of Chinese teenager Yong Xin Huang in Brooklyn and the eviction of Vietnamese street vendors from Chinatown under the broken windows policing regime. An article drawn from this research, "From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City: The Policing of Asian Immigrants in Southern Brooklyn, 1987-1995," was published in the Journal of Asian American Studies.
Professor Truong's courses include surveys of modern American history and Asian American history, as well as courses on Chinatowns, policing, and oral history. Her teaching and research are informed by her engagement with communities beyond campus. She co-coordinates two public history projects: the first preserves and engages with the archive of the grassroots organization CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities (formerly known as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) in New York City, and the second, A/P/A Voices, documents the experiences of Asian/Pacific/Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic through oral history and the collection of digital artifacts. Professor Truong received her PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
