Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Kaitlan Bui ’22 graduated from Brown with honors in English and East Asian Studies.

Her interests include cross-cultural dialogue and history. As a writer and poet herself, she seeks to understand how literature interacts with the lives we read and write about. Her honors thesis, developed under the working title “(Re-)Imagination: The Shaping of Memory in Postwar Vietnamese Diasporic Literatures and Communities,” examines the metaphors and mnemonic inheritances of the “Vietnam War.” Ultimately, it explores how imagination is used as an active tool to reclaim historical authority, particularly of displaced Vietnamese refugees. In order to extend this conversation beyond university walls, she is running a summer workshop group of 12 Vietnamese American high school students and recent graduates from Orange County, California. Together, they are piecing capital-H History with lowercase-h family history — constructing their own archive of the past. Together, they are (re-)imagining.

She served as an orator at Brown’s spring commencement, and in 2022–23, she will be a Fulbright Scholar (Vietnam).