As a refugee from South Vietnam when he was four years old Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work explores the convergence between politics and literature. The Sympathizer, his thriller about a communist double-agent won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. The United States Studies Centre was honoured to have Professor Nguyen deliver the first-ever American Cultures Lecture.
The lecture by Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen was followed by a conversation moderated by USSC Associate Professor of Politics and American Studies Brendon O'Connor.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the New York bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (Grove Atlantic, 2016). His latest book is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, published by Grove Press in March 2021.
