Marguerite Nguyen: Scholarship Rooted in the Refugee Experience

Marguerite Nguyen has been a Blue Devil basketball fan since elementary school. The daughter of Vietnamese refugees who fled Saigon in 1975, Nguyen developed an obsession for ACC basketball and would spend hours watching games in the family’s living room in southeastern Virginia. 

That early connection to Duke eventually brought her to campus to pursue a B.A. in English. “I knew I wanted to be an English major but didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do with the major,” she explains. “With a lifelong love for reading and creative writing, Duke felt like the perfect place to explore where that could take me.”  

She went on to earn her Ph.D. at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Wesleyan University. Now, Nguyen has come full circle, returning to her alma mater as an associate professor in the Department of English, where she’ll explore Asian American literature, the Vietnam diaspora and critical refugee studies. 

Nguyen is quick to admit that her research and teaching interests are products of her childhood. Her father was a “big reader” who made it a point to bring her and her sister to bookstores, filling the home with books — both in English and harder-to-find Vietnamese. “When my parents first came to the United States, reading materials in their native language weren’t readily available,” she shares. “It reached a point where he would have to drive to the Washington, D.C. area to seek them out.”  

While her father was the avid reader, her mother was the “big storyteller” who kept their culture alive by bringing Vietnamese fairy tales and stories, as well as family histories, into her daughters’ world. Growing up, Nguyen understood that she was being shaped by a combination of the colonial Virginia history of her hometown and the Vietnamese refugee history of her parents, creating a kind of hybrid cultural upbringing.  

“My sister and I were definitely exposed to books and narratives reflecting our culture and experiences, but what was shared in our home wasn’t taught to us in school,” she explains. “So, I’ve always been curious about how these narratives connected in my own life have been disconnected in the broader discourse.”  

Although Vietnamese American studies wasn’t part of that broader discourse when Nguyen was an undergraduate, by the time she was in graduate school she saw signs of a shift in the field. “In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was hard to get people to recognize that there could be a thing called Vietnamese American literature, but now we have a number of Vietnamese diasporic writers who are really staking a claim in the broader culture through memoires, fiction, anthologies and poems. Their voices are an important part of the conversation — that’s exciting.”   

This spring, Nguyen is teaching a course on the Vietnam War through literature and film, where students engage with works by American, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian American writers, alongside films such as “Apocalypse Now.” Her goal is for students to see how these narratives continue to shape our understanding of war — both in how violence is represented and in how the human experience is conveyed for all involved.  

As she explains, “The demands of contemporary life can make us feel disconnected from one another, but when we look closely at stories and histories, it becomes clear that our lives are deeply intertwined. That reality calls us to take responsibility for one another and to work collectively toward improving everyone’s lives.” 

In addition to So, the English department is welcoming two additional faculty members, Richard So and Timothy Heimlich.