Biography

Thy Phu is a Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media. After completing her PhD at the University of California Berkeley, and a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, she joined Western University, where for more than a decade, she taught courses on visual studies, cultural theory, and Asian North American culture. Her research and public humanities practice examine the intersections between media studies, diaspora and migration, vision and justice, and is author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and co-editor of Feeling Photography. Her most recent books, Warring Visions: Vietnam and Photography and Cold War Camera, explorations of the visual mediation of the global Cold War, are forthcoming at Duke University Press. Another co-edited book, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada,  is forthcoming at the University of Toronto Press. She is also Director, and PI of The Family Camera Network, a SSHRC-funded collaborative research project, which partners with arts organizations and educational institutions to engage local communities in the building of an antiracist public archive through the collection and preservation of family photographs and their stories. In 2017, she was elected as member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists at the Royal Society of Canada. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal of Trans Asia Photography and has held visiting positions at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and Yale University.