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Lina Chhun

University of Texas at Austin, United States

Lina Chhun is an Assistant Professor of American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Chhun studies historical violence, war and militarism, with a focus on questions of racial disposability in the context of the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia; she is currently completing her first book manuscript. Walking with the Ghost queries the complex relationship between registers of memory regarding the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia and the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-79, addressing questions of commemoration and mediation—how and why historical violence comes to be registered, understood, and written into the record via such mediums as archives, landscapes, and experiential narratives. The book challenges historical models of “tragedy” and liberal humanitarian discourses of trauma—as damage-centered, deviance-driven, and/or invested in abjection, vulnerability, and injury—approaches which disavow the complex humanity of Cambodian subjects and the continually intersubjective ways in which knowledge about violence in Cambodia is produced and reproduced, nationally and across the diaspora. Professor Chhun’s work has been published in Amerasia Journal and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

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