Confession, Cosmopolitanism, and Vietnamese Catholic Mobility in the Early Modern World

Biography. I trained in Chinese legal history at the University of Pennsylvania and Chinese gender and Southeast Asian social history at UCLA, my intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religion Southeast Asia, themes well-represented in my 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. 

I have just completed a new book, Catholic Identity, Religious Sensibilities, and Vernacular Writing in Early Modern Vietnam (1615-1783), examines how Vietnamese believers articulated, circulated, and practiced Christianity through their own words, preserved in letters and testimonies. I am working on two other long-term research projects: (1) an intellectual history of the idea of property from Vietnamese and Cham sources, and (2) study of the history of the book through Buddhist and Christian texts. In my research, I seek 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.”