Christina Schwenkel
Christina Schwenkel is a sociocultural anthropologist who works in the fields of cold war cultural studies, critical urban theory, decolonization, affect theory, and new materialisms. Over the past twenty years her work has examined the long-term material and cultural impacts of war and American imperialism in Vietnam.
Schwenkel’s first project focused on transnational contestations over historical knowledge production in Vietnam that played out through commemorative objects, acts, and sites of memory. Her next project examined the material and social reconstruction of Vietnamese cities and their urban infrastructure in the aftermath of aerial warfare, focusing on the spread of East German architectural models and spatial planning practices. Her latest work examines socialist cultures of expertise and the use of Bauhaus-influenced social design as world- and future-making practice in postcolonial and, later, post-reform Vietnam.
Schwenkel has published widely in scholarly journals, magazines, and edited volumes in English, German, and Vietnamese.
She is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies (SEATRiP) at the University of California at Riverside, and former Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. She currently serves as board member of Cultural Anthropology and member of the editorial team of Roadsides, a collaborative e-journal on the social life of infrastructure.
Awards
Fulbright Scholar Award, 2023-24. AAS/NEH, 2022 Graham Foundation, 2020 Wenner-Gren, 2016
Berlin Prize, American Academy, 2015
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 2012 Fulbright-Hays, 2010 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 2010
Teaching
Design Anthropology; Critical Southeast Asian Studies; Landscape and Infrastructure; Ethnographies of Post/Socialism; History and Memory; Visual Culture; Ethnographic Methods; Social Theory; Humanitarianism; Global Media; Gender and Southeast Asia; Human Rights; Anthropology of Cities; Matter and Materiality