Lecturer, Southeast Asian Studies
About
Hieu Phung (PhD, University of Hawaii) is a historian of premodern Vietnam and Southeast Asia. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Ohio State University, and she will be teaching for both the University of Michigan and the University of Hawaii in the Fall of 2020. Before coming to the United States, she taught at Vietnam National University-Hanoi and carried out extensive archival research at the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between the environment and state-building, with a particular interest in the historical agency of water and climate in stimulating social and political change. In pursuing environmental history, she makes extensive use of traditional maps and texts that reveal the production of geographical knowledge. She is working on a book project entitled The Realization of a Water Space: An Environmental History of Late Medieval Vietnam, using documents written in both classical Chinese and the demotic Vietnamese Nôm script. Her recent article, “Naming the Red River - Becoming a Vietnamese river,” will be published by the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies this December.
