You can always count on Engaging With Vietnam (EWV) to think and act “outside the box.” The 13th Engaging With Vietnam conference will be no
[Update: As I’ve researched this further, I’ve changed my mind a little bit. I still am 1 billion % sure that the “Srivjaya” that has
The 13th Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference will be held from 23-31 October 2022. This video provides information about the conference and the
Since it’s inception in 2011, Le Minh Khai’s Southeast Asian History Blog has been an effort to communicate beyond the Ivory Tower. It began as
The brief Thonburi period and the founding of Bangkok are the topics of this video. https://youtu.be/OlHZ29YpokM
Have you ever wanted to learn about Siam, get a brief overview of the history of Ayutthaya, and see a cat that can shoot lasers
The Journal of Historical Sociology has just published a special issue that contains an interesting article on English-language scholarship on premodern Vietnamese history. Entitled “Academic
The call for proposals for Engaging With Vietnam #13 has been announced. For more information, please follow the link below:http://engagingwithvietnam.org/ewv-13/
We have launched a new book series with Springer Nature called “Global Vietnam.” Please follow the link below to learn more:http://engagingwithvietnam.org/global-vietnam-book-series/
Over the past couple of years, I’ve written several posts on the problem of equating a Chinese place name, “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊, with an (imagined) polity
Long before the Vietnamese language existed, and long before there was a culture that we can identify as Việt, the genes that today exist in
The topic of Việt origins is one that people always seem to be interested in. Every year there are articles that get published in the
In two previous posts, I’ve talked about how the global university rankings system is affecting scholarship and the work of scholars. (here and here) Various
In an earlier post, I wrote about the ways in which journal rankings systems can make it difficult for people in small specialized fields to
I keep coming across references to this idea that in 1802, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, the founder of the Nguyễn Dynasty, to quote Wikipedia: “crowned himself
The world of academic knowledge production today is very different from what it was just 5-10 years ago and it will continue to change rapidly
The topic of Việt origins is one that many people find interesting. However, it is a topic that requires that one constantly update one’s knowledge.
For the past two decades, I have been working in higher education and observing how the Internet, and the digital revolution more generally, has transformed
“Gia Định báo” is the name of what many people consider to be the first Vietnamese newspaper. It was first published in 1865 in Vietnamese
Well, no, that’s not what this post is actually about. Instead, it’s just that I recently published a new article in which I “expose” some
Over the past couple of months, I have spent some time exploring Vietnamese materials that the National Library of France has digitized. As I have
Several months ago, or maybe longer, I downloaded a new article that I wanted to read, but I’ve only now had time to do so.
I recently co-wrote an article with my colleague, anthropologist Đinh Hồng Hải, on the “Lạc Việt” (Chn., Luoyue). This is a name that appears in
In the previous post I praised a recent article by Cuong Mai on premodern Vietnamese popular religion. What I particularly liked about it is the
I just read a really good article. It is entitled “The Karma of Love: Buddhist Karmic Discourses in Confucian and Daoist Voices in Vietnamese Tales
“Vietnam at the Vanguard.” Yes, we know what comes to your mind when you hear those words. You think of that legendary night. October 25,
In 2016, we invited multi-instrumentalist Ngô Hồng Quang to perform at the 8th Engaging With Vietnam conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. That encounter led to a
Whenever I write something for publication, I always think about “that graduate student.” Who is that graduate student? It’s the intelligent and talented person who
I have written and talked in the past about how I think that the generation that developed the field of Southeast Asian history in the
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Phan Văn Hùm, a Vietnamese journalist and intellectual who, among many other achievements, produced a book about the
The 12th Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference will be held next week, 24-28 August 2021. To see the conference program, please visit the
The other day, Saigoneer posted some beautiful pictures of a movie theater in Vietnam that was recently built in the Art Deco style. I saw
A few years ago I visited a farm in the countryside of Vietnam. The farmer had two types of pigs: he had several Vietnamese pigs,
In the summer of 1972, the Philosophy Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa held a conference on the Chinese Neo-Confucian scholar, Wang Yangming
In 1930, a Vietnamese teacher by the name of Trần Trọng Kim published a book called Confucianism (Nho giáo). Printed in four volumes, it covered
It recently dawned on me that it must be time to celebrate the 10th anniversary of “Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog.” Then I checked
The Google Ngram Viewer shows how many times certain terms appear in digitized printed texts. The image below shows what we see when we input
George Cœdès (1886-1969) was a French scholar of the Southeast Asian past who published prolifically, and through his writings, has exerted an enormous influence on
The 12th Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue conference is set to begin in just over a month. All of the pieces are starting to
On 8 October 1431, the king of Chuzan 中山, one of the principalities that made up the Kingdom of Ryukyu on the island of Okinawa,
Did you know that Angkorian kings used to regularly travel to the lower Mekong region to worship a female deity? No, you didn’t know that.
In researching about “Srivijaya” recently, I have been reading about Southeast Asian history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and I’ve come to realize something
Over the past few months, I have been demonstrating that information in Chinese sources that has been used for the past century to write about
How can it be possible to deconstruct/debunk 100 years of scholarship in a couple weeks/months? In 2021, it’s actually pretty easy, and this video explains
In these posts I have been demonstrating that a Chinese name (Sanfoqi) that scholars think refers to a kingdom on the island of Sumatra (Srivijaya)
After a hiatus (too busy with work!), I’m back to making videos. Here is the latest installment of the Southeast Asian History Course. For the
As I stated at the beginning of this series, there is the name of a kingdom in Chinese sources, Sanfoqi, that scholars have long argued
As we saw in an earlier post, there is a chronology for fourteenth-century Cambodian history that is recorded in a group of chronicles that we
To be able to understand the information that the Ming shilu 明實錄 (Veritable Records of the Ming) contains about Cambodia in the fourteenth century, we
For Cambodian history, there are various chronicles that record information, and the main chronicles begin by discussing events in the fourteenth century. However, the current
