Thanh Giang Nguyen

Overview

Thanh Giang Nguyen is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication & Creativity at City St George's, University of London. His research focuses on trust in the BBC and public engagement through the soft power of the UK in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Vietnam.

Before his doctoral work, Giang built a distinguished career spanning more than two decades at the BBC World Service. Most recently, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the BBC Vietnamese Service in London, where he led editorial strategy and content production across teams in London and Bangkok, reaching millions of users on YouTube and Facebook.

Earlier in his career, Giang served as East Asian Editorial Lead for the BBC News 2020 Expansion Project, spearheading the editorial expansion of the BBC World Service across Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, and held the role of Service Editor for BBC Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian language programmes within the BBC World Service.

Giang’s academic engagements are extensive. In 2024, he served as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and as a Visiting Fellow at National Chengchi University in Taipei. He has also been a panellist and guest speaker at fact-checking conferences, media literacy and digital empowerment forums in Asia and the UK.

Giang is a Reuters Journalist Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University, where he published a research paper in 2010. His academic formation includes an MA in Media Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London, postgraduate research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a Diploma in European Laws from Cambridge Law School at Warsaw University in the 1990s.  

A native Vietnamese speaker with professional fluency in English and Polish, Giang also commands advanced levels of Mandarin Chinese and French, reflecting the multilingual and cross-cultural scope of his life and career across Asia and Europe. In addition to his professional and academic achievements, he has played a prominent role as a media leader within the Vietnamese community in the United Kingdom. In 2021, he authored a book in Vietnamese that explores the rich cultural history of Britain and Europe.