Y-Dang Troeung

Y-Dang Troeung (1980–2022) was a professor and author, specializing in critical refugee studies, critical disability studies, and transnational Asian studies. Born in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand in 1980, Troeung moved to Canada as a baby. After completing her PhD in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, she was a professor at City University of Hong Kong and later University of British Columbia. She wrote Refugee Lifeworlds and Landbridge (2023), which was published after her death from pancreatic cancer.

Biography Troeung was born in January 1980. Her name comes from her birthplace, Khao-I-Dang, the refugee camp in Thailand where her family lived after surviving the bombing of Cambodia by the US, the Cambodian genocide, and the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. and working at a pen factory. She met her husband at a 2014 conference she organized called "Fashion in Fiction".

Beginning in 2018, she worked as an assistant professor at the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia, eventually progressing to associate professor. Her research interests included critical refugee studies, critical disability studies, and transnational Asian studies. She also worked with refugees at the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture (VAST). In August 2022, she published Refugee Lifeworlds.

"Swirling into a Field of Life: Works in Conversation with Y-Dang Troeung", a special issue of Canadian Literature, was published in 2025. Canadian academic Vinh Nguyen credited her with pioneering critical refugee studies in Canada, while American academic Jasbir Puar called her "the most brilliant theorist of debility I have encountered".

Writing

Refugee Lifeworlds (2022) Refugee Lifeworlds is autotheoretical, in that Troeung includes her personal experiences in writing about Cambodian refugees. Troeung defines lifeworlds as "registers of meaning in the wake of colonialism, war, and genocide that can account for duress without flattening out states of existence that can attend to pleasure, creativity, and the heterogeneity of life in blocked passages without idealizing or romanticizing the site of the subaltern”. and was an honorable mention for the 2024 Association for Asian Studies Harry J. Benda Prize.

Landbridge (2023) Landbridge is a collection of short pieces of writing. In an essay, María Jesús Llarena Ascanio describes the book as being "written as a refusal to follow a system of able-bodiedness and offer an archive, however incomplete, of mute and maimed characters who bring about other ways of collective healing." The Globe and Mail included Landbridge on its list of best books of 2023.

The book was a shortlisted finalist for the Jim Deva Prize in 2024.

Selected works

“Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy: Teaching the Vietnamese Boat People’s Hong Kong Passage.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, nos. 1–2, 2015 Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, Temple University Press, 2022. Landbridge: [life in fragments], Duke University Press, 2023. "Refugee Race-Ability". In The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Routledge, 2023.