My research focuses broadly on film and literature in French-speaking Southeast Asia. I study the representation of gender, labour and migration in relation to (post)colonial histories and contemporary neocolonial dynamics within Asia and beyond. My first book, Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Nebraska UP, 2014), explores the impact of colonial contact in Vietnam on developments in 20th-century French literature, revealing the French literary canon as always already in dialogue with literary and political forms outside Europe. My second book, an edited volume, The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything has a Soul (Rutgers UP, 2021), marks a shift in my work toward Cambodia and cinema. My current book, Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (in press, Edinburgh UP, 2025), asks how fiction can push us to think differently about gender, labour and migration in Cambodia and Vietnam. 

I founded and convene the Asie du Sud Est Research Network, a consortium of 14 universities in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. I am the Education Advisor on the Board of Directors for the Alliance Française de Canberra and a mentor for the Center for Khmer Studies Ponlok Chomnes Research Fellowship in Cambodia. I have served on the editorial board of Liverpool University Press's Francophone Postcolonial Studies series (2018-2023) and have held positions on the executive committee of the Australian Society for French Studies (secretary, 2019-2022 and vice president, 2022-2024). I have also received multiple teaching awards: two Vice Chancellor's Awards for Excellence in Teaching (2021) and Programs that Enhance Student Learning with my colleages in French (2023) and two teaching awards from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences (2020, 2022).

Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film. In press, Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

A work of close textual analysis, Sex Work in Southeast Asia examines the ambivalences that mark the sex industry under global imperialism, exploring the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers, and clients, and interrogating the neocolonial frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. The book is engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex and grounded in the historical and cultural contexts of Cambodia and Vietnam. It explores the symbolic force of sex work and the concrete conditions that lead to its prevalence within these contexts, considering how the debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. Its scenes stage encounters between particular stories and universalizing interpretive paradigms, drawing us into these debates to identify their limitations – and attempt to see what might lay beyond them. Cultivating paradox and encouraging the suspension of moral and political judgment, these scenes invite us to reimagine what is visible, sayable, and thinkable about sex work.

The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul. Rutgers University Press, 2021.

The Cinema of Rithy Panh unites a wide range of international scholars – from anthropology, sociology, history, film and literary studies – who combine both theory and close, comparative analysis to account for the thematic, philosophical and creative dimensions of Panh’s work, from his first films to the most recent. Rooted in the tumultuous history of Cambodia, especially the period of Democratic Kampuchea, Panh's films explore the enduring effects of the period on the individual and collective identities of survivors: their need to memorialize what has been lost, to establish a functioning truth, to assign responsibility and seek justice for crimes against humanity. While accounting fully for this decisive dimension of Panh’s career, this volume also links it with broader, frequently neglected, themes that give more depth to his image of the Cambodian people. The volume presents Panh as at once a Cambodian and a World filmmaker concerned with urban change, labour inequalities, the global economy, victims and perpetrators, history and the present. 

Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

This book explores an aspect of modern French literature overlooked in literary histories: the relationship between the colonies - their cultures, languages and people - and formal shifts in French literary production. Starting from the premise that neither cultural identity nor cultural production can be pure or homogenous, it initiates a new way of reading French literature: not as an inward-looking, monolingual tradition, but as a tradition of intersecting and interdependent peoples, cultures and experiences.

Student supervisions:

“The Foundation of Gender Equality in Cambodia and its Adaptation in Sangkum Reastr Niyum, 1940s-1960s.” Centre for Khmer Studies, Ponlok Chomnes Research Fellowship Program, current.

“The S-21 List in the context of memory and historical documentation.” Centre for Khmer Studies, Ponlok Chomnes Research Fellowship Program, current.

“Land of Sorrows: Postcolonial Melancholia and Vietnamese Films on the American War.” ANU PhD, Screen Studies, 2021-2025.

"Memory Construction of Mute Parents: Two Specimens." ANU PhD, English and Creative Writing, 2019-2021.

"Strange Proximities: Place, Movement and the Aesthetics of Distance in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. ANU Honours, 2017-2018. Winner: Leslie Holdworth Allen Memorial Prize for highest overall mark in English Honours.

“La Décomposition d’une œuvre: Alain Resnais et le spectacle cinématographique.” ANU Honours, 2015.

“Charlotte Delbo et la poétique de l’horreur: Du silence à la parole.” ANU Honours, 2013.

20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature and film (esp. Southeast Asia); gender, labour and migration; trauma and memory studies; fiction and ethnographic representation; immigrant writers and minority discourse, contemporary metafiction in French