Professor Nguyen-vo's expertise spans Women's Studies in Vietnam, Southeast Asian Political Science and Asian American Studies. Her recent publications include "Who You Truly Are: The Global Imaginary of Labor Division and Governmental Rehabilitation of Sex-Workers in Vietnam" and Khmer-Viet Rlations and the Third Indochina Conflict. She served as the editor of Doi Thoai, a forum for political discussion by contributors in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora and played a founding role in Tram Hoa Van No & Nhung Van De Viet Nam, a publication for the Vietnamese diaspora of writings from Vietnam. Until her appointment beginning with the academic year 2001-02, Professor Nguyen-vo had been teaching in the College of Liberal Studies at California State University in Los Angeles since completing her Ph.D. in Political Science in 1998.
In her own words, Professor Nguyen-vo describes her current research as an examination of "the negotiations of garment workers in Vietnam and in the diaspora in Southern California in relation to differing governmental practices and codes of consumption. The purpose is to interrogate class in a transnational economy, as well as class as a category of analysis in Cultural Studies. If Vietnamese workers in Vietnam and Vietnamese immigrant workers in the US share a racialized and feminized labor location in global production, could we say that they constitute a transnational class whose members share class significations and perceptions or solidarity? I examine workers' narratives of work relations and objects consumed; body significations through the use of consumers' products of soap, shampoo, cosmetics, clothing, and jewelry; literary representations of garment workers' subjectivities; governmental subject-making practices like mobilization campaigns and government labor union practices."
Courses taught include: "National and Post National Politics," "Topics in Vietnamese Film and Literature: Colonial and Post-Colonial Framing of Nation," "Displacement, Emplacement, and Vietnamese Immigrants," and "Nation and Globalization in SEA."