Los Angeles (USC News, Feb 13,2018): USC President C. L. Max Nikias has appointed Paula Cannon, C.-C. Jay Kuo, and Elyn Saks as Distinguished Professors and Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jacob Soll as University Professors.
University Professor Nguyen of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and MacArthur Fellow. Nguyen is internationally known for his groundbreaking works in fiction and non-fiction, providing key insight and perspective to a global audience and exploring critical issues related to the immigrant experience, both historical and current, across generations, races, and political divides.
Among other accolades, his debut novel, The Sympathizer, has emerged as one of the most celebrated works of fiction in the past twenty-five years, winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence from the American Library Association and a California Book Award. Acclaimed for its compelling and inventive narrative of the Vietnam War, the novel was a New York Times bestseller and named to over thirty best-of-the-year lists. His collection of stories The Refugees was a bestseller, and his nonfiction Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.