Faculty Member

Christina Schwenkel
(Assistant Professor, Ph.D. 2004 University of California Irvine)
Office: 1327 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-5523
E-mail: cschwenk@ucr.edu

Professor Schwenkel’s research focuses on the intersections of transnationalism, visual culture and historical memory in Vietnam. She has conducted multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City on transnational practices of memory; post-war reconciliation; photographic representations of war and suffering; and the global politics of historical knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. Her research has traced transnational flows of images of the U.S.-Vietnam War and shifts in the aesthetics of memory at Vietnamese museums, war monuments, art and photography exhibits, and tourist sites. She has written on the representational practices of Vietnamese war photographers (Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2008) and on the transnationalization of memory at former battle sites that are now tourist attractions (Cultural Anthropology, 2006). Her book manuscript, under contract with Indiana University Press, looks at encounters between conflicting transnational representations and recollections of the war, and competing attempts by diverse U.S. and Vietnamese historical actors to define and maintain particular visions of historical truth, knowledge and objectivity. Professor Schwenkel is currently writing on Vietnamese commemorative art and architecture and the “traditionalization” of war monuments. Her next project will continue to explore architecture and transnationalism, though in the context of socialist exchanges and mobilities between Vietnam and former East Germany; in particular, Vietnamese guest worker programs in German factories and German architectural/urban planning projects in Vietnamese cities. She is interested in the ways in which the legacies of these socialist projects contribute to current national and international agendas to develop a neoliberal market economy in Vietnam.