AMS Faculty Spotlight—Dr. Lina Chhun!
Dr. Lina Chhun, Assistant Professor (she/her)
Contact information: lina.chhun@austin.utexas.edu
Question (Q): What are your research interests, both academic and for fun!?
Answer (A): It’s funny because no matter how many times I’m asked this question, I still find it difficult to answer—regarding my research interests. They’re incredibly varied and constantly shifting (which is one of the main reasons I love being situated in American Studies). I’m interested in historical and cultural memory, in transnational forms of knowledge production, in popular culture, in technologies of subjectification (how we come to understand ourselves as subjects moving, living, being in the world), in feminist approaches that move beyond liberal understandings of reparation, freedom, and desire… I also have a somewhat unhealthy addiction to reality television, a kind of love/hate relationship with Bravo TV, in particular (I know, terrible but fascinating). I think I’m probably pretty basic when it comes to my “nonacademic” interests, actually. There are so many courses I’d like to teach here at UT but one I’d like to resurrect from my time as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford is called “All Things Basic,” which is essentially a grab bag of topics loosely related to popular culture trends.
Q: Are you currently working on any projects (academically or otherwise), and if so tell us about them!
A: I’m currently working on my first book manuscript Walking with the Ghost (subtitle continually changes, currently it’s: Silences, Memory, and Cambodian American Histories of Violence), which is something of a deconstruction and reconstruction of my doctoral dissertation, which itself began as a critique of my master’s thesis. Partly due to the nature of return and revision integral to the project, I’m thinking of the book as a methodological intervention… an imperfect exercise in feminist reflexivity necessary to the process of doing research on violence. The book began as a set of oral history interviews conducted over a decade ago with members of my immediate and extended family regarding the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-1979 and has shifted to become an inquiry into why and how violence registers—in personal narratives, inter- and trans-generationally, in historical, collective, national, and transnational narratives, within archival collections and institutions, and across space and time. I’ve also become especially interested in manifestations of Cold War orientalism—initially in relation to the narrativization of Cambodian history—but also in mainstream cultural productions like the film Eat, Pray, Love and within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Dr. Chhun in Cambodia conducting research!
Q: What is the nature of your work? What method(s) do you utilize the most? How does your work align with American Studies at UT?
A: I think the nature of my work… is multi-methodological and necessarily interdisciplinary, largely due to my academic training. I utilize a range of methods from autoethnography and other ethnographic methods to archival frameworks to close readings of visual and material cultures. I think this kind of capacious approach to theory and method aligns well with American Studies at UT where folks are doing an amazing range of work, both utilizing and reorienting traditional disciplinary approaches to doing research.
Q: How did you come to American Studies as a discipline?
A: I came to American Studies as a discipline in a highly roundabout way and perhaps like Dr. Steve Hoelscher articulated, somewhat serendipitously. I actually began my doctoral career in Social Psychology, where I first conducted oral history interviews with my family… this too, after shifting from a more policy-focused research trajectory and switching advisors. At the time, I was highly reluctant to do research so explicitly situated at the intersection of the personal, political, and historical… but I was fortunate to encounter some really amazing feminist mentors who were highly supportive of the work, at my first graduate institution and then at UCLA, where I eventually received my PhD in Gender Studies. I came to American Studies during my second round on the academic job market... I had not received formal training in American Studies as an undergraduate or graduate student but drew heavily from American Studies scholarship, especially American cultural studies scholarship, in my own work.
The academic job market was… well, that’s a much longer conversation for another time, perhaps… and the situation has changed somewhat as well, but at the time, part of my struggle was making my work legible to different academic audiences. I was told once when I was a graduate student, that in my transnational feminist approach to Cambodian and Cambodian American Studies, that I was something of a unicorn… and it felt a little bit like that while on the market, especially because of my treatment of gender as an analytic rather than an identity category in the dissertation project. And then I encountered this job posting from UT, with appointments in American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Asian American Studies, and it seemed too good to be true, but here I am.
Q: How does American Studies at UT make your work possible?
A: In so many ways, one of the most significant reflected in my previously narrated experience of the academic job market… American Studies at UT makes my work possible. There’s a real investment in interdisciplinarity and openness to reaching across traditional disciplinary boundaries in the department and a kind of collegial complementarity in terms of methods and training. We have a wonderful intellectual community here.
Q: Favorite thing about AMS at UT?
A: My favorite thing about AMS at UT… I love working with students, in an individual advising capacity but also within the context of the classroom. My own work and thinking always changes and shifts as a result of the conversations and discussions we have, and in graduate seminars especially, when I oftentimes assign texts that are new to me too, there’s a collaborative quality to the knowledge we produce that’s really exciting to me.
Bonus Q: What is a fun fact about you that you would like your colleagues, peers, and students to know about you?
A: I love thrifting, for myself as well as my dog, Ivy. One of my favorite things to do is to visit Goodwill and find half-off graphic tee-shirts and sweaters in the children’s section to add to Ivy’s growing wardrobe.
Batman (left) and Ivy (right) wearing their new shirts! Batman is Dr. Chhun’s sisters dog!
