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 cultural and infrastructural impacts of war and American imperialism in Vietnam.

Schwenkel's first project focused on transnational contestations over historical memory in postwar Vietnam, examining how commemorative objects, sites, and practices shaped historical knowledge production. Her second project shifted from material traces of the past to utopian ideas about the future as she analyzed how gifted infrastructure and traveling architectural models shaped socialist reconstruction and spatial planning of bombed Vietnamese cities. Her interest in socialist planning and cultures of expertise led to an ongoing project on Bauhaus-inspired design as world- and future-making practices in Vietnam. Schwenkel’s latest work on sensory autoethnography during the pandemic extends her research on the multisensory dimensions of urban disaster and decay to encompass the anthropology of sound.

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 on the Editorial Committee at University of California Press, and is a board member of Cultural Anthropology and a 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, 2016-17
Berlin Prize, American Academy, 2015
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 2012-13 Fulbright-Hays, 2010-11 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 2010-11

Teaching

Design Anthropology; Critical Southeast Asian Studies; Landscape and Infrastructure; Ethnographies of Post/Socialism; History and Memory; Visual Cultures; Ethnographic Methods; Social Theory; Humanitarianism; Global Media; Gender and Southeast Asia; Anthropology of Cities; Matter and Materiality