Viet Trinh

Viet N. Trinh is a doctoral candidate whose fields of interest include race and ethnicity, urban history, African American history, Asian American history, and twentieth-century United States history. His dissertation, “Burning All Illusions: Race and Rebellion in the City of Angels, 1950-1992,” traces black and Korean Angelenos’ fights for justice and citizenship in an age of law-and-order policing. It advances a twofold argument: First, law enforcement agencies functioned as mechanisms for overseeing and containing racialized undesirables amidst a postwar socioeconomic crisis, and second, Angelenos therefore had to navigate and tangle with the police as part of their struggles for justice. Built upon years of research conducted across California, the project reflects his firm commitment to excavating phenomena otherwise buried in the historical record by listening through archival silences and reconsidering subjugated knowledges. It centers not only well-known policymakers, police chiefs, and political dissidents, but also gangsters, grocers, and everyday people entangled with the law. A bottom-up history, “Burning All Illusions” positions marginalized people at the forefront of our conversations around race, urban policy, and the modern carceral state.

 

Before moving to New England, Trinh studied at the University of California, Riverside. He proudly hails from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area.