He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching emphasizes modern Vietnamese literature and culture, twentieth-century Southeast Asian literature, postcolonial studies, colonial modernity, and translation studies. He has published articles in a variety of these topical areas and in several different journals such as the The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, positions: Asia Critique, and PMLA. His current book project, Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam, examines how the radical 1919 displacement of the 1000-year-old Chinese-influenced mandarinal system by a French baccalaureate curriculum created the conditions for modern Vietnamese literature.