Leslie Barnes is an associate professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the literature and film of colonial Indochina and contemporary Cambodia and Vietnam, in English, French, Khmer and Vietnamese. She is the author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Nebraska, 2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (Rutgers, 2021). Her monograph on literary and cinematic representations of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam will be published with Edinburgh University Press's New Directions in Francophone Studies: Diversity, Decolonization, Queerness in 2025.