Nhung Tran

Nhung Tran trained in Chinese legal history at the University of Pennsylvania and Chinese gender and Southeast Asian social history at UCLA, her intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religion in Southeast Asia, themes well-represented in her scholarly and pedagogical work. Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (co-edited with Anthony Reid, 2006) provided a first look at the new trends in historical scholarship on Viet Nam in the twenty-first century. Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam (2018), the first full-length study of Vietnamese women’s history in any language, examines how some women negotiated state law and local custom to secure their financial and spiritual futures. She has just completed a new book, Catholic Identity, Religious Sensibilities, and Vernacular Writing in Early Modern Vietnam (1615-1783), which examines how Vietnamese believers articulated, circulated, and practiced Christianity through their own words, preserved in letters and testimonies. She is currently working on two other long-term research projects: (1) an intellectual history of the idea of property from Vietnamese and Cham sources, and (2) a study of the history of the book through Buddhist and Christian texts. In her research, she seeks to understand how individuals living in the plural religious settings of early modern Vietnam understood and articulated the meaning of institutions and objects that have been presumed to be “universal.”

She teaches broadly in the areas of gender, food, religious, and regional histories in the Indian Ocean World. These include introductory lecture courses such as HIS110Y: “Connected Histories from Dakar to Jakarta,” which she team-teaches with Professor Sean Hawkins; HIS205H: “Introduction to Gender History,” and HIS283Y: “History of Southeast Asia.” She also teaches upper-level thematic and regional courses such as HIS315H: “History of Vietnam,” HIS331H1: “Vietnam at War,” HIS333H1: “Catholic Asia,” and HIS342H: “Rice, Sugar, & Spice in Southeast Asia.” Additionally, she teaches small seminars at the first- and fourth-year levels, including HIS198H: “Decolonizing Women’s History,” HIS406H: “Gender in East and Southeast Asia,” HIS400H: “The French and American Wars in Viet Nam,” and HIS496H: “Religion and Society in Southeast Asia.” At times, and with generous funding from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences through the International Course Module Program, she has been able to take students enrolled in her courses to Southeast Asia.

In addition to her scholarly and pedagogical work, she is committed to public history and forging links between scholars and the local stakeholders impacted by research. To these ends, she has collaborated with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology and Buddhist and Catholic communities in Viet Nam. She has led an international team of researchers evaluating women's access to land rights across ten provinces in Vietnam for the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP). She is a former director of the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at UofT and has served on the Editorial Board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (as Chair 2013-14), and the Board of Directors of the Association for Asian Studies.