Dr. Lan Duong is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at UC Riverside. She is working on a book entitled Family Binds: Betrayal and Loyalty in Viet Nam and the Diaspora. The book explores the films and literature of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora through the theme of treason and the practices of collaboration. Dr. Duong's second book project, From the National to The Transnational: Cultural Revolutions of Vietnamese Cinema, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present-day. Her research interests include transnational feminism, postcolonial theory, youth culture, gender, sexuality, and queer diasporas. Her critical works can be found in Amerasia, The Journal of Asian Cinema, and Transnational Feminism in Film and Media. She is also a poet and has been published in Watermark, Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Poetry, Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Literature, and Crab Orchard Review.

In the past year, Lan has been awarded two major grants from the University of California's Office of the President (UCOP) and UC Riverside's Center for Ideas and Society (CIS). As a Co-Principal Investigator, she will be co-organizing two conferences at UC Riverside. Scheduled for October 2008, one of those conferences will focus upon "Southeast Asian Cinema and the Supernatural." Reaching across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, this conference features both film screenings of horror films and scholarly work on the genre. The film festival will screen notable films from Viet Nam, Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand, which deal with supernatural phenomena such as ghosts and spirit mediums. Public conversations with film directors and scholars in Southeast Asian studies, film/media studies, and other related disciplines will follow the screenings. The second conference she will be co-organizing takes place in May 2009. This conference investigates the enormous legal and medical ramifications of Agent Orange. Yet, it also aims to explore the lingering effects of Agent Orange in other discourses as well. Her and her colleagues plan to organize a series of dialogues that discuss Agent Orange and its visibility in multiple discourses: legal, technological, scientific, medical, photography, art, and film. By bringing together a diverse and international set of artists, activists, scholars, and veterans, this conference explores how people interpret and depict the war's multiple legacies and its lasting impact on the land and human body.

Dr. Duong is teaching a number of new courses including: Asian Horror: En/Gendering Ghosts and the Supernatural, UCR Asian American Women: Writing the Self in Literature and Film, UCR Vietnamese and Vietnamese Diasporic Cinemas: Imagining Nationhood in a Globalized Era, UCR Postcolonial Conditions: Southeast Asian Diasporic Literature and Films, UCR International Cinemas: Global Perspectives on the Vietnam War, UCR