About

Vivian Truong is a community-engaged historian who takes an intersectional and comparative approach to the study of Asian American movements. She is Assistant Professor of History at Swarthmore College. Her areas of research and teaching include Asian American studies, 20th century U.S. and urban history, and women of color feminisms.  

Vivian’s book project, “Policing and the Construction of Asian America,” examines Asian American and multiracial movements against police violence in New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s. Based on oral histories and newly recovered archival sources, this project examines cases including the 1995 police killing of Chinese teenager Yong Xin Huang in Brooklyn and the eviction of Vietnamese street vendors from Chinatown under the broken windows policing regime. The project argues that policing was a major site of Asian American racialization in the late-twentieth century.

Vivian coordinates a public history project, “Memory and Movement,” which documents over three decades of Asian American community organizing in New York. The project partners with the grassroots organization CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities (formerly known as the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence), where she currently serves as a board member and formerly worked as a youth organizer. She has also had experience in youth leadership development with APIAVote-Michigan, Chinatown Youth Initiatives, and Providence Youth Student Movement. Vivian is a proud born-and-bred Brooklynite and daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees. She earned her A.B. in Ethnic Studies from Brown University and Ph.D. from the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where her dissertation won the 2020 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award.