Y-Dang Troeung

Wall Scholar

Title

Assistant Professor

Department/School

Department of English Language & Literatures

Faculty

Arts

University

UBC

Geographic Location

Canada
Y-Dang Troeung

Sadly, Prof. Y-Dang Troeung passed away November 27, 2022. Read remembrances from her fellow Wall Scholars and her UBC colleagues here.

Prof. Y-Dang Troeung specializes in transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, and global south studies. Her work has a specific focus on genealogies of colonialism, war, and militarism in Southeast Asia and its diasporas. She is interested in how literary and cultural representations mediate knowledge of the Cold War, old and new, as it has played out in the “hot war” regions of Asia and the transpacific.

Primary Recipient Awards

Y-Dang Troeung – Wall Scholars – 2020

As a Wall Scholar, Prof. Troeung plans to complete her book manuscript on the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, a project that investigates the relationship between war, refuge, and creative reparation. The book casts renewed attention on one of the worst refugee catastrophes of the twentieth century: the ruination extending from the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia, a nation which became a “hot” laboratory of ideology and proxy war for the global superpowers during the Cold War, haunts the memory of the world, yet there remains a collective silence about this history. The book turns to literature, film, and auto-theory as a means of addressing this silence, arguing that attention to Cambodia’s past is crucial to understanding and challenging the necropolitics and collateralization of life occurring in the war zones of today.

Prof. Troeung will also use her time at the Peter Wall Institute to begin working on a second project entitled Land Bridge. A term originating from the field of biogeography, a land bridge refers to the formation or surfacing of a geographical land mass that connects two larger areas across an expanse of water. Drawing inspiration from the Cambodian land bridge of 1979, this interdisciplinary, creative non-fiction project will consider the network form of refugee land bridges wherein human flows connect the borders of refugee camps and homelands.