Nguyen, Mimi Thi, 1974-....

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife (Duke University Press, 2012). She is also co-editor with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam of a special issue of positions on Southeast Asian American Studies (20:3, Winter 2012), and co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007).

Nguyen has made zines since 1991, including Slander (formerly known by other titles) and the compilation zine Race Riot. Race Riot is the first zine by and for punks of color to comprehensively address race and racisms in punk and riot grrrl. She is a former Punk Planet columnist andMaximumrocknroll volunteer; she is also a frequent collaborator with Daniela Capistrano for the POC Zine Project. She has published numerous essays on queer subcultures and punk feminisms, and is presently examining what it is to be an unruly object in the newly institutionalizing archives of Riot Grrrl and punk.