alan t. yeh

Alan’s current book project, 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. Revising research from his dissertation, 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, 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, such research aims to illuminate strategies for and stories of reassembling homes, lives, and diasporic memory in displacement. 

Alan previously completed his MA (2021) and PhD (2026) in French from the University of California, Berkeley. He also received his BA (2018) from Hamilton College where he double majored in French and Francophone Studies and Literature. During his undergraduate studies, Alan spent a year in Paris through Hamilton in France, studying at l’Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle – Paris III. Afterward, he spent another year in the Occitanie region of France as a high school assistant de langue through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). He is happy to talk to undergraduate students who are interested in pursuing opportunities to study and live abroad.

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, or singing his heart out in karaoke.