Howie Tam
Assistant Professor of English
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Pronouns: he / him / his
Bio
Howie Tam is an assistant professor in English at Brandeis. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Before arriving at Brandeis, Dr. Tam held postdoctoral fellowships at Dartmouth College and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
Research Interests
Asian American literature and film, Vietnam War literature and film, critical refugee studies, queer of color criticism, Vietnamese studies, critical race studies of the U.S. and France
Selected Publication
- "B-Sides : Anthony Veasna So's 'Afterparies."Public Books, January 2025.
- "Diasporic Vietnamese Metafiction of the 1.5 and Second Generations." Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora, edited by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen. Routledge, 2024, pp. 292–306.
- "'Reste métèque': Linda Lê's Problematic Nation in Calomnies." L'Esprit Créateur, vol. 63, no. 4, 2023, pp. 62–74.
- "Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai's Archival Art and Organic Ephemera." Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 9, no. 1, 2023, pp. 43-56.
- "Refugee Racial Form, Vietnam War Legacies, and Late Liberal Affects." Refugees, Refuge, and Human Displacement, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosín. Anthem Press, 2023, pp. 111-25.
- "Diasporic South Vietnam: Literary Nationalisms in Novels by Ly Thu Ho and Lan Cao." Journal of Vietnamese Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2020, pp. 40–86.
- "Revising Ho Chi Minh: Diasporic Historical Fiction in The Book of Salt and The Zenith." American Literature, vol. 91, no. 2, 2019, pp. 357–83.
Current Project
"Rewriting Vietnam: Forms of Nationhood in Diasporic Literature"
This book project in progress examines issues of national belonging, refugee cultural politics, and the Vietnam War’s legacy in diasporic Vietnamese literature from the United States and France. This project demonstrates how diasporic subjects challenge dominant narratives of war and postcolonial nation-building across Vietnam, the U.S., and France.
Courses Offered
- AAPI/ENG 115A The Asian American Memoir
- AAPI/ENG 102A Science and Fiction of the Transpacific
- AAPI/ENG 22B Asian American Literature
- ENG 48A American Immigrant Narratives
- AAPI/ENG 142A Vietnam War Representations
- EAS 120B Southeast Asian Literature in English
- Graduate Seminar: The Transpacific: Theory and Literature