Global Vietnam Book Series and Journal
This year, Phan Lê Hà and I, with the support of a wonderful team of associate series editors, editorial board members and a series editorial assistant, launched a new book…
The Great Dispersal: Academia Today
I always enjoy looking around me and trying to get a sense of what is happening in my profession. I’m an historian of Southeast Asian history, but I also have…
This Should Be The Revision Age!!
One point that I keep bringing up, but I don’t find it getting recognized, is the fact that the capabilities that we now have when we conduct research in the…
Popular Confucianism/Culture in Premodern Vietnam
If there is one topic in Vietnamese history that I think people today have the hardest time understanding it is the topic of “Confucianism.”Why is that?Well, it’s a long story,…
History in the AI Age: A Self-Reflection
In the spring of 1994, during my first year of graduate school, I took a seminar on Chinese Intellectual History. In that seminar, in addition to weekly readings and discussions,…
The East Asian Context of Lý Dynasty Buddhism
I recently read a chapter by the late historian John K. Whitmore entitled “Building a Buddhist Monarchy in Đai Viêt: Temples and Texts under Lý Nhân-tông (r. 1072–1127)” and it…
Tianxia/Thiên Hạ in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam
A few years ago, I was invited to write a paper on the concept of “Tianxia” (Thiên Hạ) in nineteenth-century Vietnam, and that paper has now been published.The paper is…
The Confucian Brain Drain in Ming Occupied Vietnam
I have been writing about the established narrative in English-language scholarship on premodern Vietnam which sees the Lý and Trần dynasty periods as a time when Confucianism played a limited…
Hồ Quý Ly’s Confucianism from an East Asian Perspective
If you read the extant scholarship on premodern Vietnam, you will discover that historians have presented a story about the past which argues that there is very little evidence of…
Pale Scholars in Trần Dynasty Vietnam
In the extant English-language scholarship on Vietnam, most scholars argue that there was little presence of Confucianism during the period of the Lý Dynasty (1009-1225) and that it was only…