alan t. yeh

Alan’s dissertation, Con ăn cơm chưa (Child, have you eaten yet)? Care and Culinary Crossings in Diasporic Vietnamese Memory, examines care and its tensions through the lens of food. He argues that the culinary and commensal both serve as a primary means of care in displacement and can offer an analytic site for exploring and critiquing care’s complexities. Working across genres (novels, memoirs, graphic novels, film, photography, and administrative documents and other archival material), national contexts (Vietnam, France, the US, and Canada), and theoretical frameworks while also curating an oral history archive to complement and inform the dissertation, he considers the ways in which diasporic and refugee subjects reimagine care and food as care, interrogate their promises, and expose their coercive co-optations. Amid the inhospitable conditions of humanitarian governments and an ineffectual global refugee regime, this project asks what literary, aesthetic, and gastronomic strategies exist for not only creating alternative pathways to and forms of care, but also preserving diasporic and refugee memory? Ultimately, this dissertation aims to illuminate strategies for and stories of reassembling homes, lives, and diasporic memory in displacement. 

Prior to his PhD at Berkeley, Alan received his BA from Hamilton College in 2018 where he simultaneously completed individual honors theses for French and Literature, both exploring the relationship between language and racial/identity formation in Asian diaspora literature (Franco/Québécois-Vietnamese and Korean American respectively). He also spent a year in Paris through Hamilton in France, studying at l’Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle – Paris III, and another year in the Occitanie region of France as a high school assistant de langue through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). 

Alan T. Yeh’s academic and creative publications can be found in L’Esprit Créateur, diaCRITICS (a publication of DVAN, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network), and The Academy of American Poets’ annual poetry contests. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation as well as UC Berkeley’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. 

When he is not poring over experimental literary aesthetics, Alan is experimenting in the kitchen, trying new restaurants in the Bay Area, or singing his heart out in karaoke.