I’ve been sick recently, but I have a lot of ideas in my head and so I decided to record a video about them.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the field of Southeast Asian Studies, and how it fits (or doesn’t) in the world today. In the process, I came across some articles in Vietnamese online papers about a recent conference on Southeast Asian Studies in Vietnam that was recently held at Vietnam National University in Hanoi (VNU).
Anyone who has visited my flash blog about the need to transform Asian Studies for the digital age (Content Asian Studies) or who has read my piece in the Mekong Review on the decline of Asian Studies knows that I think a lot about the changes that are taking place in the world today (the rise of the Internet, the decline of the Humanities, etc.) and how those changes affect those of us who work in the field of Asian Studies.
These days there are many universities in Asia that devote incredible amounts of energy towards improving the ranking of their respective university in world ranking systems. The QS World University…
Let's meet some of the scholars who have been invited to speak at the upcoming 10th Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference in HCM City and Phan Thiet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hemZ70lywV0
Last summer, in preparation for the 10th Engaging With Vietnam conference, we had a conversation with Dr. Khuất Thu Hồng, founder and director of the Institute for Social Development Studies…
Here is the second part of a conversation with Victor. T. King about tourism and heritage and tourism in Southeast Asia. Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies at…
I recently had a talk with Professor Victor T. King about tourism and heritage in Southeast Asia. Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies at The Institute of Asian…
Earlier this year as part of the “Vietnam ‘67” series of essays that appeared in the New York Times, historian Olga Dror published a piece about schools for Vietnamese that were set up in southern China during the Vietnam War called “How China Used Schools to Win Over Hanoi.”
I recently gained access to a database of PhD dissertations and MA theses in China. Out of curiosity, I did a search for “越南” (Vietnam) and was amazed at what I found. . .
From what I have been able to determine, so far in this century there have been close to 100 PhD dissertations completed in China that deal with some aspect of Vietnamese history, with the majority having been completed in the last decade. The number of MA theses is also very large, and many of those have been completed in the past few years (indicating that this trend of scholarship on Vietnam getting produced in Vietnam is only going to increase).
I was reading Phan Ngọc’s The Characteristics of Vietnamese Culture (Bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam, 1998) and came across a passage where the author was talking about differences between Vietnam and China by referencing the supposed higher level of autonomy that Vietnamese women had in the past in comparison to their Chinese sisters.