Associate Professor
Department of Global and International Studies
559 Social Science Tower
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
Email: longb@uci.edu
Research Areas
Digital Media & Popular Culture, Vietnam/Asian/American Studies, Cultural Geography, Critical Education Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, History and Memory, Race, Gender & Sexuality
Media Requests
I do not work so fast around reporters’ fast timelines. Please give me a day at least to respond.
Biography
Long T. Bui is an Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He had previously taught as a faculty member in Science and Technology Studies and Sociology at Vassar College. He held the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Riverside and the Chancellor’s Research Associate Fellowship at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign. His scholarly interests include refugee memory, contemporary Vietnam and Global Asias, higher education, race/gender/sexuality in the media, and the history of technology.
He is the author of Returns of War: South Vietnam and Price of Refugee Memory (2018), and Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton (2022). He has published articles in Journal of Asian American Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Global Society etc. They touch on a range of issues like cyberhacking, film, reality tv, music, graphic novels, currency wars, drag, consumerism, urbanization. Bui has a PhD in Ethnic studies and BAs in Political Science and Asian American Studies. His research has been funded by the UC New Racial Studies grant, UCHRI, the Center for Global California Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He is a first-gen scholar.
Service
In the Global and International Studies Department, I am the Graduate Program Director. You can contact me with academic questions about the grad program (logistical ones related to application should go to Jessica Canas-Castenedas).
At the campus-wide level, I am the director of First-Gen Faculty Initiatives coordinating first-gen activities on campus. I am involved with many DEI projects on campus, such as LIFTED, a program to help grant to college degrees to incarcerated people.
In the School of Social Sciences, I am on the advisory committee for the Diversity, Inclusion, & Racial Healing Ambassador Program (DIRHA), where we teach local high school students about diversity by bringing them to campus. I am director of Summer Academic Enrichment Program (SAEP), a five-week intensive summer program. Apply if you are a first-gen college student and a low-income (Pell grant) social science major who wants to learn how to do research and apply to grad school.
Mentoring: If you wish to work with me as an advisor/mentor please tell me your interests and why you want to work with me and how exactly my research specifically overlaps with yours. My strong commitment to mentoring and service has been recognized through awards like the Tom Angell Fellowship Faculty Award (Office of Inclusive Excellence), Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Service (Academic Senate), Dr. Joseph L. White Award for Outstanding Mentorship (School of Social Sciences), and the Frances M. Leslie DECADE Mentor Excellence Award (Office of Inclusive Excellence)
Publications and Research
Link to press to purchase: https://nyupress.org/9781479871957/returns-of-war/
Synopsis: In 1975, the country of South Vietnam fell to communism, marking a stunning conclusion to the Vietnam-American War. Although this former ally of the United States has vanished from the official world map, Long T. Bui maintains that its memory endures for refugees with a strong attachment to this ghost country and who are now found in various global spaces like France, the United States, Iraq/Afghanistan, and (post)socialist Vietnam. Blending ethnography, oral history, archival research, and cultural analysis, Returns of War considers how the legacy of a Cold War-constructed nation that only existed for twenty years is being kept alive by its dispersed stateless exiles. Bui frames the political economy of memory to answer this question: how do refugees continue to lose or profit from their attachments to a lost nation.
Bui, Long T. Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory. NYU Press, 2018
Link to press to purchase: Bui, Long T. Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton. Temple University Press, 2022
Synopsis: In the contemporary Western imagination, Asian people are frequently described as automatons, which disavows their humanity. In Model Machines, Long Bui offers the first historical overview of the overlapping racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their conflation with the robot-machine nexus. He puts forth the concept of the “model machine myth,” which holds specific queries about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights in the transnational making of Asian/America. The case studies in Model Machines show how Asians are reimagined to be model machines as a product of globalization, racism, and colonialism. Starting from the early nineteenth century, the book ends in the present with the new millennium, where the resurgence of China presages the “rise of the machines” and all the doomsday scenarios this might spell for global humanity at large. Pre-order book from online vendors or press: https://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000010538 (use code: T30P for 30% discount)
Journal Articles and Book Chapters (click on hyperlink titles to PDF of published work)
Global Asias and International Political Economy
Bui, Long T. “East Asia’s Vietnam: Trauma Returns and the Sub-Empire of Memory,” Trauma in East Asia. Edited by Jeff Kingston and Tina Burrett. London: Routledge, 2023, pp. 395-407
Bui, Long T. Bui and Ayako Sahara, “Creative Citizen Peacebuilding: Japanese Artists and Audiences Respond to the Vietnam-American War,” Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 28.2 (2022): 1-25
Bui, Long T. “Asian Roboticism: Connecting Mechanized Labor to the Automation of Work.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 19.1-2 (2020): 110-126
Bui, Long T. “Monetary Orientalism: Currency Wars and the Framing of China as Global Cheater,” Global Society 33:4 (2019): 479-498
Bui, Long T. “Glorientalization: Specters of Asia and Feminized Cyborg Workers in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism 13:1 (2015): 129-156.
Contemporary Vietnam and Post-Socialist Globalization
Bui, Long T. “Heteroglossia of History: Remembering the Republic of Vietnam in Contemporary Vietnamese Film,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14:4 (2019): 1-40
Bui, Long T. “Global War Cities: Traces of the Militarized Past in Saigon’s Urbanized Future,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2.1 (2016): 141-169
Bui, Long T. “Globalization and the Public Cartographies of Vietnam Idol,” positions: east asian critique 20:4 (2012): 886-910
Critical Refugee Studies and History & Memory Studies
Bui, Long T. “Diasporic Im/mobilities: Migrants, Returnees, Deportees, Expats, Tourists and Beyond in the Vietnamese Homeland,” The Intersections of Tourism, Migration, and Exile. Edited by Natalia Bloch (Adams Mickiewicz University) and Kathleen M. Adams, London: Routledge Press, 2023, pp. 60-77
Bui, Long T. “Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge,” Journal of Asian American Studies 18:1 (2015): 73-97
Bui, Long T. “The Refugee Repertoire: Scripting the Experience of Displacement, Migration and Survival,” MELUS 41:4 (2016): 112-132
Race and Sexuality Studies
Bui, Long T. “Model/Minority Veteran: The Queer Asian American Challenge to Post-9/11 U.S. Military Culture,” Q&A 2.0: Voices from Queer Asian North America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021, pp. 257-264
Stevie Ruiz and Long T. “Unearthing Racial Histories of Sexology in the Global South,” Ethnic Studies Review 43:1(2020): 96-112
Bui, Long T. “Breaking into the Closet: Negotiating the Queer Boundaries of Asian American Masculinity and Domesticity,” Culture, Society and Masculinities 6:2(2014): 129-149
Bui, Long T. Letting Race and Sexuality Talk,” Essays on Brokeback Mountain. Edited by Jim Stacey. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007, pp. 153-162
Gender and Feminist Media Studies
Bui, Long T. “Refugee Worlding: M.I.A. and the Jumping of Global Borders,” Amerasia Journal 47.1 (2021): 60-72
Strings, Sabrina and Long T. Bui. 2014. “‘She is Not Acting, She Is’: The Conflict between Gender and Racial ‘Realness’,” Journal of Feminist Studies 14(5) (204: 1-15
Bui, Long T. “Sex Hacking: Configuring Chinese Women in the Age of Digital Penetration,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 6 (2014)
Higher Education Studies and Critical University Studies
Bui, Long T. “On the Struggles and Experiences of Southeast Asian American Academics,” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement 16:1(2021): 1-29
Stevie Ruiz and Long T. Bui. 2021. “Reflections on the Political Attacks against Chicanx and Ethnic Studies.” Aniversarios de Resistance. Edited by Martha D. Escobar, Alicia I. Estrada, and Melisa C. Galvan, La Habana, Cuba: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Americas, 125-132
Bui, Long T. “A Better Life: Asian Americans and the Necropolitics of Higher Education.” Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader. Edited by Critical Ethnic Studies Collective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016
Bui, Long T. 2015. “The Beauty of the Beast: Cross-Cultural Centers and Social Justice Work in Times of Educational Turmoil,” Nexus: Complicating Community and the Self. Edited by Edwina Welch et al. San Diego, CA: Cognella Press, 218-226