Tag Archives: displacements

CEFRES Team

Maika Nguyen – Research & CV

VAEDID : ‘”Vietnamese” Across “Europe”: Displacement, Identity and Dis/connections’

Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices.

Maika Nguyen is a literary researcher and joined CEFRES in January 2026 for two years. She is interested in migrant literature, diaspora studies and postcolonial studies. She holds a doctorate in French and Francophone Studies (University College Dublin, 2025), where she wrote her thesis on representations of the return home in the autofiction of Dany Laferrière (Haiti) and Anna Moï (Vietnam). In it, she argued for a re-evaluation of the relationship between understandings of the self and current conceptions of home in postcolonial autofiction.

At CEFRES, she will be undertaking a postdoctoral project on the Vietnamese diaspora in Europe, during which she will analyse the works of Vietnamese directors and writers across four countries: the UK, France (including its overseas territory, Martinique), Germany and the Czech Republic. The project examines, on the one hand, the question of identity in the Vietnamese diaspora, whose members have experienced and remember differing “Vietnams” (notably North/South Vietnam); on the other, it compares the representation of migrant experiences in (post)socialist European countries to those in Western European ones, thereby shedding light on the intersections between our collective memory, in its contested and plural forms, of North/South (Vietnam) and East/West (Europe) divides.

CV

Education

  • 2025: PhD in Literature (French and Francophone Studies), Université College Dublin, Ireland. Thesis: ‘Writing Home: Haiti and Vietnam in the Autofiction of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï’, supervised by Prof Mary Gallagher. 
  • 2021: MA in French Philology and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University, Czech Republic.
  • 2018 : BA in French Philology, Charles University, Czech Republic. 

Conference Papers (selection)

  • 2025 : Roundtable, ‘Legacies of 1975 in Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas: Fifty Years Afterward’, Modern Languages Association, New Orleans. 
  • 2024 : ‘The Returnee as Tourist (Guide) in the Autoficiton of Dany Laferrière and Anna Moï’, Research Seminar, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin.
  • 2023 : ‘Viết, Việt: relating and translating Vietnam in Anna Moï’s autofiction’, Society for French Studies Annual Conference, Newcastle University.
  • 2023 : ‘Returning to my water(s)? Considerations of “home” in Nostalgie de la rizière by Anna Moï’, Passages, University College Dublin 
  • 2022 : ‘The Lens of ‘Home’ in Migrant Writing: Memory and Identity in Vietnamese Migrant Literature’, Faculté de lettres, University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Vietnam National University).

International Research Exchanges

  • 2023: University of the French Antilles, Martinique. Erasmus+ doctoral exchange.
  • 2022 : University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, Vietnam. Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility.

Publications

  • ‘Returning to Home Water(s) in Nostalgie de la rizière by Anna Moï’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 2025.
Research

Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Research in this area aims at further developing understandings of displacements that impact people, knowledge and practices by exploring the ways they are transformed as they pass through space and time. The term ‘displacement’ covers the whole scope of mobilities, flows and circulations related to people, material, cultural goods and ideas. Displacement involves renegotiating and reshaping that which it affects. Indeed, displacement involves crossing borders, whether symbolic or concrete, where interactions, exchanges, contacts and frictions can occur. Continue reading Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices →