“All wars are fought twice: the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” says Viet Thanh Nguyen RI ’09, an associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Nguyen, the Suzanne Young Murray Fellow at Radcliffe this year, is writing a comparative study of nationalist practices of commemoration—whether in literature and the arts or in the public sphere. In the study, he examines how we remember a war that, he explains, “Americans call the Viet Nam War and the Vietnamese call the American War.”

A published writer of short fiction, Nguyen is completing his first short-story collection, titled “After This Life, Another.”

Photo by Webb Chappell. With special thanks to the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.