Jacinda Tran
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History
Jacinda Tran is an interdisciplinary scholar of visual culture, space, and empire. Her research and teaching examines the legacies of U.S. militarism across racial and gendered landscapes.
Tran’s current book project, Search and Destroy: Southeast Asia/ns through the Lens of U.S. Visual Warfare, analyzes the transnational and transhistorical visual archives of U.S. intervention in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The book charts an expanse of visualizing technologies developed during the so-called Vietnam War and beyond to demonstrate how "search and destroy" (the imperative to look in order to gather information and thereby inflict violence) persisted in the postwar construction and reception of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians in the U.S. The project considers technologies of visualization—such as aerial surveillance, chemical defoliation, and photojournalism, among others—alongside wartime violence, militarized rescue, national securitization efforts, and refugee resettlement throughout the latter half of the 20th century. In so doing, Search and Destroy puts forward a notion of “visual warfare” to engage the ways in which visuality has continually structured social and material formations of race, difference, history, and memory.
Jacinda Tran received her PhD in American Studies from Yale University, with a graduate certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Social Science Research Council.