On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam

Christina Schwenkel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the program in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of memory and the postwar rebuilding of urban infrastructure. Schwenkel is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana, 2009). Her recent publications examine urban architecture and the cultural legacies of the global Cold War through socialist circulations of knowledge, labor, and technology between Vietnam and East Germany (GDR).