The Asian Institute is delighted to announce the appointment of Nhung Tuyet Tran as Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies beginning January 1, 2018. We are thrilled to have her serve in this role as she works to strengthen the centre with public lectures, innovative research, and student initiatives.

Tran is an Associate Professor of History. Trained in Chinese legal history at the University of Pennsylvania and Southeast Asian social history at UCLA, her intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religion in early modern Vietnam. She is the author of Familial Properties: Gender, State & Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1460-1783 (Hawai’i, 2018) and editor of Vietnam: Borderless Histories (Wisconsin 2006, co-edited with Tony Reid). She is currently writing a monograph on the cultural history of Vietnamese Catholicism (1680-1783).  Tran is also committed to public history and the relationship between the production of history and development policy. To these ends, she has collaborated with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology on an exhibit that explores Roman Catholic culture in contemporary Vietnam (2008-09). She has also led a team of researchers for the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) in a study that measures women’s access to land rights across ten provinces in Vietnam (2011-12).