Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê

About Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê

Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She came to understand her heritage and identity through Buddhism—a religious tradition that taught her to embrace the complex history of her family and identity. 

Recognizing that her life was made possible by war and oppression, and by the miracle of survival and new beginnings, Adrienne seeks to break open our understanding of the past in order to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War. She overturns rigid, dualistic frameworks by telling history in a way that treats all sides as fully human. 

Adrienne is writing the first historical biography of Thích Nhất Hạnh, the monk who taught the world mindfulness, which will be published by Knopf. She earned her BA from Yale and PhD from Columbia with a focus on modern Vietnam, US empire, decolonization, and global migration—and wrote her dissertation on the Vietnamese Buddhist movement as a force for postcolonial nation-building. Adrienne's work has been featured in the Cambridge History of the Vietnam War and the Journal of Vietnamese Studies as well as on popular media platforms like Tricycle and On Being. 

Before starting her doctoral studies, Adrienne was a nonprofit campaigner and strategy consultant in New York City working on refugee resettlement, women’s rights, gun reform, creative technology, and civic participation. She is ordained in the Order of Interbeing, a community in the Lâm Tế tradition of Buddhist meditative practice founded by Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh, and served on the Board of the Thích Nhất Hạnh Foundation for nine years.