Christina Schwenkel

Christina Schwenkel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of historical memory and postwar reconstruction of urban infrastructure. Schwenkel is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (2009) and a co-edited special issue of positions: asia critique (with Ann Marie Leshkowich), “Neoliberalism in Vietnam” (2012). Her most recent publications examine the social and architectural legacies of the global Cold War through socialist circulations of knowledge, labor, and technology between Vietnam and East Germany, including Vietnamese contract workers and architecture students in the GDR (Critical Asian Studies; Central and Eastern European Migration Review) and East German urban planning and reconstruction of Vinh City (Cultural Anthropology; International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity; American Ethnologist). She is currently writing a book entitled Planning the Postwar City: East German Urban Design and its Afterlife in Vietnam. Schwenkel’s work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, American Council of Learned Societies, and the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program.