Join the History of Art and Visual Culture program at CCA for our HAVC Writers Talk series: conversations between HAVC faculty members and invited guests about recent and ongoing research. 

On December 6th, at 5:30pm Pacific via Zoom, Professors Việt Lê (CCA) and Erik Harms (Yale) will be discussing Professor Lê’s new book, Return Engagements: Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh, published in 2021 (Duke University Press), which considers the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.

Erik Harms is Professor of anthropology and chair of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University. He is an urban anthropologist with extensive research experience on social life in Ho Chi Minh City. Harms is the author of Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon, and Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City, as well as numerous journal articles and academic publications.

Việt Lê is Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at CCA, and affiliated faculty in Visual and Critical Studies. He is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. In addition to Return Engagements, Lê has been published in:

• positions: asia critique
• Crab Orchard Review
• American Quarterly
• Amerasia Journal
• Art Journal
• Newsweek Asia

...and has writings in the anthologies:

• The Perfume River
• Strange Cargo
• The Spaces Between Us
• Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art