Scholar Spotlight: Shaping the Future of Heritage Studies with Phi Nguyen
When Dr. Phi Nguyen thinks of her first visit to the Vietnamese city of Huế as a child, she remembers how a tour guide described it as a “quaint, ancient capital," offering the impression of Huế as a royal city. Little did she know, this experience would lay the foundation for her dissertation more than a decade later. Deciding to revisit the city in 2017, Nguyen started exploring beyond the city’s touristic sites into its quieter corners.
"These experiences inspired me to found the collaborative research and exhibition project “về Huế” (about Huế), which sought to unravel the city’s mnemonic sites, and participate in the research collective “Site and Space in Southeast Asia.”
Now a Postdoctoral Fellow and architect within the MacMillan Center’s Council on Southeast Asian Studies, Nguyen’s work connects architecture, urbanism, and heritage studies to understand how Huế’s historically displaced communities cohabit with the local territory and conserve their shared history through everyday life.
After conducting extensive research in 2018 and 2019, Nguyen is now organizing a manuscript workshop for her first book project, Liquid Montage: People, Waters, and Memories in Postcolonial Huế. The book explores Huế through its water and land dynamics and the lived experiences of communities often overlooked in official histories.
Additionally, Nguyen examines Huế not only through its royal past and UNESCO status but also through everyday spaces that shape community life. Communal halls, shrines, ancestral houses, and even the shade of a banyan tree are seen as “mnemonic sites,” lived places that connect people to their history and offer a sense of belonging.
"One thing that struck me then was that navigation tools did not work in the villages. Locals find their way not by GPS but by memory.
Nguyen’s background in architecture plays a key role in her research approach. Instead of relying only on archives, she studies the built environment, from modest village structures to monumental landmarks.
Between 2018 and 2024, she conducted fieldwork across 28 villages along the Hương River, documenting how communities live with, adapt to, and remember their environment. These immersive experiences ground her book’s central idea: that conservation is inseparable from daily life and the coexistence between humans, more-than-humans, and their shared history.
As she prepares for her manuscript workshop this semester, Nguyen is eager to transform her project from dissertation to book and to receive feedback from an interdisciplinary panel of scholars.
“One of my main goals has been to step away from the ‘student mode’ of writing to embrace my own voice,” she says. “I’m excited to hear insights from colleagues across fields and to strengthen the manuscript before sending it to publishers.
Through her innovative research, Nguyen is reframing how heritage, memory, and ecology intersect in postcolonial cities. Her work not only deepens understanding of Vietnam but also contributes to global conversations on conservation, development, and urban life.