New Duke English Faculty Members
This fall, the Duke English department will have three new additions to its faculty. The department welcomes Professors Marguerite Nguyen, Associate Professor of English; Professor Richard Jean So, Associate Professor of English; and Professor Timothy Heimlich, Assistant Professor of English.
Associate Professor of English - Marguerite Nguyen
Professor Nguyen, a Duke English alum, joins the department from Wesleyan University. Her studies have focused on American Literature and Asian American Studies. In 2018, Temple University Press published her work America’s Vietnam, which recounts a largely unexamined story of Southeast Asia’s enduring and multifaceted influence on U.S. aesthetic and politics.
This fall, she will join the department and teach English 101S: The Art of Reading-Imagining America and English 274S: Introduction to Asian American Literature.
Associate Professor of English - Richard Jean So
Professor So joins the department from McGill University, Montreal, Québec. His studies employ data-driven methods to study culture, both historical and contemporary, combining humanist methods of interpretation, such as close reading, with new computational methods, including machine learning and natural language processing.
His bookwork, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. It examines racial inequality in the publishing industry and its impact on postwar fiction through a data-driven approach.
This fall, he will be teaching English 101S: The Art of Reading - Introduction to Narrative and English 890S: History of Contemporary Lit Criticism.
Assistant Professor of English - Timothy Heimlich
Professor Heimlich joins the department after teaching at the University of Cambridge (UK) and in the Netherlands. His studies focus on eighteenth-century literature, with special interests in the formation of British Imperial culture, Transnational Studies, and the global contexts of British Romanticism. Heimlich’s work, Wales, Romanticism, and the Making of Imperial Culture, published by Cambridge University Press, is set to be released later this year.
This fall, he will be teaching English 101S: The Art of Reading - Monsters, Pirates & Empresses and English 248: British Literature 1660-1790 - Defoe to Austen.
Join us in welcoming these new members of the Duke English faculty. The department will host events during the 2025-26 academic year, providing the Duke community with the opportunity to meet and greet these wonderful additions to the department.
