Pamela Nguyen Corey

Fields of Interest:  

• Modern and contemporary art history and visual studies (regional focus: Asia, Southeast Asia)
• Theories of postcolonialism and decoloniality, urbanism, space, diaspora, transnationalism, globalization, historiography, sound, voice

Education: Ph.D. 2015, Cornell University, USA

Bio:  

Pamela Nguyen Corey is a scholar of modern and contemporary art history whose research and teaching focus on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, and her PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University. Before joining Fulbright University Vietnam in January 2021, she served as an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art & Archaeology at SOAS University of London.

Corey’s scholarship has appeared in numerous academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and platforms dedicated to artistic and cultural commentary. Her first book, The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), supported by a Millard Meiss Publication Fund award from the College Art Association, offers a new framework for understanding the spatial formation of contemporary art practices in Vietnam and Cambodia. Centering contemporary artists’ engagements with urban forms and temporalities, the book challenges prevalent interpretations of postwar artistic subjectivity and contributes to broader discussions of place, memory, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.

Corey’s second book project examines the media logics and technologies used by artists from Southeast Asia and its diasporas to create what she terms “impossible communications”- dialogic forms predicated on temporality, animacy, and cultural suppression. Conceived amid postwar trauma, historical amnesia, and generational or archival loss, these artistic practices test the limits of communication and open new theoretical paths for understanding the politics of memory and transmission.

She has co-edited special journal issues such as “Voice as Form” (Oxford Art Journal, 2020), which advances scholarship on voice, sound, and aurality in contemporary art. Other lines of research extend to global modernism, debates surrounding the decolonization of art history, and contemporary art from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Within the latter, she is particularly interested in late socialist aesthetics, diasporic and transnational subjectivities, and historiography as a site for creative and theoretical possibilities.

Corey’s work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the British Academy. In 2019 she was named a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. She currently serves on the International Advisory Board for Art History (the journal of the Association for Art History), the Editorial Board of Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos, and has been a member of

advisory committees for National Gallery Singapore and The Flow of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists (Asia Art Archive / AWARE).

Courses: 

• Introduction to Visual Studies
• Introduction to Art History and Theory
• Global Modern Art
• Arts of Southeast Asia
• Visualizing Vietnam
• Contemporary Asian Artists
• Sound Art
• Advanced Readings in Art Theory and Criticism

Select Publications:  

Corey, Pamela N. “Theory from Historiography: Stanley J. O’Connor’s and T.K. Sabapathy’s Writings on Southeast Asian Art.” Art History 48, no. 4 (2025), forthcoming.

Corey, Pamela N. “The (Calli)graphic Regimes of Contemporary Vietnamese Art.” ArtMargins 13, no. 3 (2024): 13-35.

Corey, Pamela N. “The Digital Voice as Postcolonial Proxy.” In The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History, eds. Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, 353-362. Routledge, 2023.

Corey, Pamela N. “Craft and the Making of ‘Global’ Contemporary Art.” In A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, eds. Jane Chin Davidson and Amelia Jones, 119-131. Wiley-Blackwell, 2023.

Corey, Pamela N. “Hacking the Grid: Urban Interventions by Artists from Southeast Asia.” Lahore Biennale 01 Reader, ed. Iftikhar Dadi, 256-279. Skira Editore, 2022.

Corey, Pamela N. The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia. University of Washington Press, 2021.

Corey, Pamela N. “Toward a Horizon of Un-Knowing: Aurality, Voice, and the Politics of Identification in the Art of Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier.” Oxford Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 221-38.

Corey, Pamela N., and Wenny Teo, eds. “Voice as Form,” special issue of Oxford Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 2020).

Corey, Pamela N., and Nora A. Taylor. “Đổi Mới and the Globalization of Vietnamese Art.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14, no. 1 (March 2019): 1-34.

Corey, Pamela N. “Siting the Artist’s Voice.” Art Journal 77, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 84-96.

Corey, Pamela N. “Beyond yet Toward Representation: Diasporic Artists and Craft as Conceptualism in Contemporary Southeast Asia.” Journal of Modern Craft 9, no. 2 (July 2016): 161-81.

Corey, Pamela N. “Three Propositions for a Regional Profile: The History of Contemporary Art in Ho Chi Minh City.” In Arts du Vietnam: Nouvelles Approches, eds. C. Herbelin et al., 135-144. Editions Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015.

Corey, Pamela N. “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2 (March/April 2014): 72-84.

Corey, Pamela N., and Ashley Thompson, eds. “On Modern and Contemporary Cambodian Art and Aesthetics,” special issue of Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies 12 (2014).

Corey, Pamela N. “The ‘First’ Cambodian Contemporary Artist.” Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies 12 (2014): 61-94.

Corey, Pamela N. “Crafted Signs of Obsolescence: Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Aesthetic Artifacts.” Art Journal 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 46-57.