Fall 2015 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, comparative literature
Vinh Pham is a first-year Ph.D. student in the department of Comparative Literature at Cornell. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Spanish from Florida Atlantic University, where he focused on literary works from the late 19th and early 20th century Spain and Latin America. His interests include; trans-pacific literature, post-colonial theory, comparative colonialism, colonial race-politics, and gender identity in former Asian colonies. His current work deals with the intersections of race and power relations in colonial Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on vernacular texts from French Indochina and the Spanish Philippines. His body of work is seeking to outline the commonalities between these political entities in terms of their geographical nature, as well as similar relations with Western powers, and theorize about how these processes have informed the formation of their national identities and perceptions of modernity.