Zines - Personal Archives or Public Record: A Conversation Between Mimi Thi Nguyen & Janice Radway

In accompaniment to the exhibit "Scrap Paper: Belonging & Resistance" in Thompson Library Gallery, The Ohio State University Libraries is pleased to present a conversation between Dr. Mimi Thi Nguyen (Professor, Dartmouth College) and Dr. Janice Radway (Professor Emerita, Northwestern University), moderated by Courtney Hunt (Associate Professor, Art & Design Librarian) and Leticia Wiggins (Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies & History Librarian). These two scholars will situate their conversation within their scholarly work and personal history. Dr. Radway will discuss her book project on 1990s girl-made zines and their enduring and lasting impact, while Dr. Nguyen will reflect on her intellectual trajectory from zines and back again as an archived object and historical person, as she preps the collection of her punk writings for publication (with punks). 
   
These reflections will be followed by a conversation between Dr. Radway and Dr. Nguyen. A question-and-answer period will follow their conversation. 
   
This program is supported by The Ohio State University Libraries and co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and The Ohio State Center for Feminist Research, Education and Engagement (FREE Center).

Light refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP by Oct. 1, 2026.

Featured Speakers

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her first book, called "The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages," focuses on the promise of "giving" freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war (Duke University Press, 2012; Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association of Asian American Studies, 2014). Her second book is called "The Promise of Beauty," which considers beauty as a fruitful concept through which we engage narratives of crisis (Duke University Press, 2024). She is also co-editor with Mariam Lam and Fiona I.B. Ngo of a special issue of positions: asia critique on Southeast Asian American Studies (20:3, Winter 2012); and co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of "Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America" (Duke University Press, 2007). 
   
She has also published in "Signs," "Camera Obscura," "The Funambulist," "Women & Performance," "positions," "Radical History Review," and "ArtForum" and her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University. 
   
Nguyen has made zines since 1991, including "Slander" (formerly known by other titles) and the compilation zine "Race Riot." She is a former "Punk Planet" columnist and "Maximumrocknroll" volunteer. She is also co-author of the retired research blog on dress and beauty threadbared. In June 2013, Sarah McCarry's Guillotine ("a series of erratically published chapbooks focused on revolutionary non-fiction") released "PUNK," a conversation between Nguyen and Golnar Nikpour. Nguyen is working on a collection of columns and essays. 

Janice Radway is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication at Northwestern University. Previously, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the American Civilization Department and at Duke University in the Literature Program. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from Michigan State University and is Past President of the American Studies Association and former editor of American Quarterly. She received an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden and the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Award from the American Studies Association for outstanding contributions to the field. She is the author of "Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature," which won the Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association as a classic in the field. 

Professor Radway is also the author of "A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire" and co-editor (with Carl Kaestle) of Volume 4 of "A History of the Book in America, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States," 1880-1940, and, with Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank and PennyVon Eschen, co-editor of "American Studies: An Anthology." In all of these volumes, Professor Radway has traced the impact of gender and sexuality on women’s reading and writing. She is currently working on a book entitled "Girls, Zines, and their Travels: Selfhood and the Struggle for New Social Forms in the 1990s." By combining oral history, archival work and textual analysis, the study traces the many different routes girls followed into the practice of creating zines and investigates the range of ways they used their self-publishing to contest normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and racialization. Professor Radway teaches “Girlhood in Public Culture,” and “High School in American Public Culture” and a number of graduate classes on cultural studies, media studies and book history.