Cathy Schlund-Vials
Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies
CLAS Building - Room 121
860 486. 3950
Cathy.Schlund-Vials@uconn.edu
Asst. Professor of English and Asian American Studies beginning Fall Semester 2007 at UConn, Cathy Schlund-Vials received her Ph.D. in English, with an American Studies concentration, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her dissertation, "Pledging Transnational Allegiances: Nationhood, Selfhood, and Belonging in Asian American and Jewish American Immigrant Narratives" is a comparative study of immigrant fiction that traces its development during the twentieth century.
Her research and teaching interests include immigrant and refugee narratives, Asian and ethnic American literature, 19th century American literature, Asian American/ethnic/cultural studies, American realism, and modern and contemporary American literature and drama.
Rooted in a personal history marked by both immigration and naturalization, Schlund-Vials' academic projects are informed by the experiences of dislocation and migration, and the crucial connections between history, memory and citizenship/belonging. She explores narratives that traverse both countries of origin and countries of settlement. She links authors as diverse as Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far (aka Edith Maude Eaton), Israel Zanwill, C.Y. Lee, Mary Antin, Gish Jen, Nechama Tec and Luong Ung by suggesting that citizenship is an unstable outcome that occurs through the constant re-imagining of transnational affiliations. She also examines how each of these authors negotiate the complicated matrix of sociopolitical belonging through the public process by which immigrants obtain citizenship in the country of settlement, that is, naturalization. Her work moves the scholarly consideration of immigrant narratives from the static and unilateral - as simplistic stories of exodus and deliverance, rebirth and assimilation, and dramas of generational conflicts - to a more politicized and multi-sided discussion of diaspora and ideological border crossings.
Prof. Schlund-Vials is particularly passionate about her work on Cambodian American literature and cultural productions that both memorializes Cambodia's "Killing Fields" and hopes to reclaim a pre-genocide nationality.
An award-winning teacher,
she takes her teaching cues primarily from her students, whom she has
credited with "breathing life into a syllabus and making it a living
document." As a jointly appointed faculty member of both English
and Asian American Studies, Prof. Schlund-Vials holds a critical piece
of the Institute's course offerings and the canon's solidly growing field
of Asian American Literature.
Selected Publications:
"Familial Bonds, Citizenship, and Selfhood: The Function of Family
in Luong Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia
Remembers." Embodiments of Asian Pacific Islander Sexualities.
Gina Masquesmay and Sean Metzger (Editors). Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press,
2005.
Review Essay: Asian
American Literary Studies (Edited by Guiyou Huang), Literary Gestures:
The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing. Edited by Rocio G. Davis
and Sue-Im Lee, and Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites
and Transits. Edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen
Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino. Journal of Asian American Studies.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming.