V.N. Trinh is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and African Studies and in the Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. As a political and intellectual historian of the twentieth-century United States, he thinks about Black and Asian American radicals, their proto-abolitionist and anti-imperialist struggles, and their encounters with the state’s counterinsurgencies. At present, he is drafting two books-in-progress: Burning All Illusions: Race and Rebellion in the City of Angels—under contract with University of California Press—covers Los Angeles’ diverse, multi-racial left as it reckoned with the ascendance of law-and-order policing. Into the Belly of the Beast: Researchers, Radicals, and Refugees in Cold War California carries out interwoven investigations of Silicon Valley’s military-industrial complex, of the Black Panther Party and the Third World Liberation Front, and of Southeast Asian refugee enclaves around the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. In the past, he has published shorter pieces through a variety of outlets, including Time and Washington Post.

As an educator, Trinh firmly believes in the mission of public schooling for everybody, including incarcerated people living behind bars. Between 2019 and 2022, he acted as a site coordinator, volunteer, and sometimes guest lecturer for the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Now, Trinh maintains an ongoing relationship with the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project. He delivers some of his courses to incarcerated Ohioans through the project, and he coordinates its “Utopias and Dystopias” learning community at the London Correctional Institution.

Before moving to Columbus for Ohio State, Trinh taught at Earlham College, Lafayette College, Southern Connecticut State University, and Yale University. He received his PhD in History and two other graduate degrees from Yale, and his undergraduate degree in History from the University of California, Riverside. He proudly hails from the Bay Area.