Duy Lap Nguyen
Modern and Classical Languages
Assistant Professor
Office: 620 Agnes Arnold Hall
Phone: 713-743-2519
Email: dnguyen66@uh.edu
Duy Lap Nguyen is an assistant professor of world cultures and literatures at the University of Houston. His work has appeared, most recently, in Thesis Eleven (2015), Constellations (2015), Differences (2015), Interventions (2014) and Historical Materialism (2010). Nguyen’s current research explores works by the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo and develops a reading of Thảo’s materialist critique of phenomenology. A second project, titled “The Postcolonial Present: Redemption and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Culture and History,” examines Vietnamese cinema, literature, and mass culture from the Vietnam War era.
Critical Studies Courses
- WCL 2352 - Introduction to World Cinema
The course will explore a variety of primarily non-Western films and media practices as a way of reconsidering received ideas about the role of the media and media technology within modern society. These ideas have been shaped in large part by the particular history of media and cinema in the US and Europe. As many postcolonial critics have argued, this history informs our understanding of a contemporary global media environment that increasingly fails to conform to the normative models, derived from the West, of the relationship between media and modernity. Many of these environments are marked by the absence or partial collapse of an official public sphere, traditionally defined in terms of an institutionalized national print culture, a national cinema and civic journalism. This collapse has been accompanied by the emergence of informal media networks and infrastructures built on pirated technologies of reproduction. Instead of dismissing these developments as aberrations diverging from an increasingly exceptional norm defined by the West, we will consider these new media environments as alternative models for re-conceptualizing the role of media in contemporary global society.