Ann Ngoc Tran
Biography
Ann Ngoc Tran (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
As a historian specializing in Global Southeast Asia, the American War in Viet Nam, and 20th-century U.S. history with dedicated attention to studies of race and ethnicity, her research delves into the archives of forced migrations, Asian diasporas, and material histories of refugee boats and ships in the South China Sea and the U.S. Gulf South.
She is an Association for American University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellow and a USC-Mellon Humanities in the Digital World 2024-2025 Fellow. ?Ann’s writing has appeared in The Radical History Review and Amerasia Journal.
Education
- B.A. History, Texas Christian University, 2020
- B.A. English, Texas Christian University, 2020
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
My dissertation, “The Ark is Already Gone: A History of Boat Refugee Non-Arrival,” examines the vernacular experiences of Vietnamese boat refugees as they navigate the longue durée of imperial warfare, sovereign and extralegal violence, migrant economization, and climate catastrophes. The project analyzes multiple sites of drifting, disappearance, and wreckage across the South China Sea and the U.S. Gulf South to bring together a history of “non-arrival,” an analytical framework for charting the non-linear transits and surplus materialities that do not reify the nation or refuge as naturalized endpoints of forced migration. Challenging state-centric narratives that frequently position boat refugees within temporal (refugee to resettlement) or spatial (homeland to asylum) trajectories, which privilege survivorship and arrival, my chapters turn instead to ellipses in the historical record—the people abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those caught or left behind in the homeland between 1975 and 1992, thousands of lives lost to starvation, rape, and storms at sea, and incidents of pushback and repatriation in Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. I trace these silenced histories to gravesites erected on the grounds of former refugee camps and the material remnants of boats, now scattered as skeletons on coral islands, shipwrecks submerged beneath the sea, and “resettled” debris on coasts devastated by Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil Spill. Within these sites of tragedy and catastrophe, the project argues for “non-arrival” as a counter-geography of the nation-state, insisting on the acts of survival, resistance, and life-making that map emergent radical relations and critical knowledge formations in the wake of violence and loss.
Research Keywords
Vietnamese American history, Diaspora and Migration Studies, Global Southeast Asia, Asian American history, Critical Refugee Studies, Vietnam War, transpacific studies, U.S. empire
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Conference Presentations
- Society for Military History Young Scholars Conference (cancelled) , 5/2020
- Association for Asian American Studies (cancelled) , 4/2020
- Association for Asian American Studies , 4/2019
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Journal Article
- Tran, A. (2023). Imperial Gift: Soap, Humanitarianism, and Black Markets in the Vietnam War. Radical History Review. (147), pp. 55-76.