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Yến Lê Espiritu

Distinguished Professor

Biography

Originally from Việt Nam, Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Espiritu has served as Department Chair, President of the Association of Asian American Studies, and Vice President of the Pacific Sociological Association. She also has extensive experience working with refugee and immigrant communities in San Diego. An award-winning author and a recipient of multiple grants, Espiritu has published extensively on Asian American communities, critical immigration and refugee studies, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. A founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), Espiritu is the co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022), written collaboratively by CRSC members.  Espiritu is the recipient of several UCSD teaching awards: the Eleanor Roosevelt College’s Outstanding Faculty Award; the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award; and the Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Awards for Excellence in Graduate Teaching; and the inaugural recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Mentorship Award.

Research Interests

Critical refugee studies; critical immigration studies; Asian American studies; gender and migration; U.S. militarism

Education

Ph.D., Sociology - University of California, Los Angeles, 1990
M.A., Sociology - University of California, Los Angeles, 1987
B.A., Communication - University of California, San Diego, 1985

Selected Publications

  • Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). 2014. University of California Press. *
  • (with Lan Duong). “Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art.” Signs 14(3): 587-615, 2018. Winner of the 2018 Florence Howe Award, Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages, Modern Language Association. 
  • (with Lisa Lowe and Lisa Yoneyama). “Transpacific Entanglements.” In Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials. Fordham University Press, 2017.
  • “Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies: A Transpacific Critique.” American Quarterly 69 (3): 483-490, 2017.
  • Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Recipient of the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Social Sciences; and the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award for the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.
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