Vietnamese Studies Conference

Center for Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley
Graduate Conference on Vietnamese Studies
February 9-10, 2007

The Center for Southeast Asia Studies is hosting a graduate student conference at Berkeley from February 9 - 10, 2007. The conference is intended to provide an opportunity for young scholars to share their research with their peers and with faculty involved in the field of Vietnamese Studies. The conference is free and open to the public. To register, please send your name and institutional affiliation to the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, cseas@berkeley.edu.

Keynote address by Prof. Alexander Woodside
(University of British Columbia) on Friday, Feb. 9, at 5:00 p.m.

DAY 1
Friday, FEB 9
Location: Geballe Room, Townsend Center for the
Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley

8:35-8:45 a.m.
Welcome & Opening Remarks

8:45-10:30 a.m.
PANEL I:  Politics of Urban and Rural Change in Late Socialist Vietnam

The Blurred Boundaries of Voluntary and Involuntary Resettlement: The Case of Cat Tien National Park in Vietnam
Jason Morris-Jung, UC Berkeley (presenter) & Robin Roth, York University

Disruptions of a Dialectic and a Stereotypical Response: The Case of the Ho Chi Minh City Tourism Industry
Jamie Gillen, University of Colorado

Ho Chi Minh City's Emerging Middle Classes, Global Youth Culture and the Possibilities of Post-Socialism
Catherine Earl, Victoria University

Commodification of Governance: Music Production in Vietnam
Nhu-Ngoc Ong, UC Irvine

Discussant: Marguerite Nguyen, UC Berkeley

10:45-12:10 p.m.
PANEL II: The Vietnam-China Interface: New Perspectives, Old Questions

The Bach Viet and Vietnam's "Place" in Larger Regional Groupings
Michael Churchman, Australian National University

Marginalizing Practices: Bureaucracy, Ethnography, and Becoming Chinese in Colonial Vietnam
Trung Nguyen, University of Wisconsin

Sinicization and Syllable Structure in Vietnamese
John Duong Phan, Cornell University

Discussant: Charles Wheeler, UC Irvine

1:45-3:10 p.m.
PANEL III: Religious Pluralism: World Traditions and Local Practices

Tradition, Renovation, New Religious Movements: A Triptych of Vietnamese Religious Pluralism in Cambodia during the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Pascal Bourdeaux, Ecoles Pratique des Hautes Etudes

The Occult Religion of the Ly Court
Minh Huynh Tran, CSU Long Beach

And I Will Build For Thee a Great Nation:  The First Vietnamese Bishops, Popular Culture and Politics in Colonial Vietnamese Catholicism
Charles Keith, Yale University

Discussant: TBA

3:20-4:50 p.m.
PANEL IV: Self, Place, and Space:  Narrating Past
and Present in and beyond Vietnam

Reading Hanoi's Sense of Place: Local Culture and Hyper-space/tradition
Dinh Quoc Phuong, University of Melbourne

Kieu in Redux : The Poetics of Narrative, the Immigrant Imaginary and the Articulation of Vietnamese Transnational Womanhood
Cam Vu, University of Southern California

The Past is a Distant Colony
Hong-An Truong, University of California, Irvine

Discussant: Mariam Beevi Lam, UC Riverside

5:00-6:30 p.m.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Vietnam: The Adventures and Misadventures of Global Theory
Alexander Woodside, Professor Emeritus of History, University of British Columbia


DAY 2
Saturday, FEB 10
Location: IEAS Conference Room, 6F, 2223 Fulton St. (at Kittredge), Berkeley CA

9:00-10:45 a.m.
PANEL V: Identity Constructions and Transformations in the Indochina Wars

Unearthing Vietnam: Archeology and Nation Building in Communist Viet Nam
Haydon L. Cherry, Yale University

From the Foreign Legion to the Viet Minh: Emil Selhofer, a Swiss Crossover in the First Indochina War
An Lac Truong Dinh, University of Basel

From Bangkok to Bear Cat: The Winding Road for Thai Expeditionary Forces to Vietnam
Sutayut Osornprasop, University of Cambridge

�The Kiem Thao and the Uses of Disposable Time in the American War in Vietnam�
Duy Lap Nguyen, University of California, Irvine

Discussant: Tuong Vu, Naval Postgraduate School

11:00-12:25 p.m.
PANEL VI: Nineteenth Century Vietnam in
Retrospect: Textual Legitimacy and Repositioning the Past

How to Shoot a Gun: Hoang Ke Viem and the Plot to Save Dai Nam, 1869-1887
Bradley Davis, University of Washington

The Scholar-Recluse as Cultural Consanguinity or Invented Tradition?: Nguyen Dynasty Literary Reconstructions of Vietnam's Literary Past
Jason Hoai Tran, Cornell University

The Nam tien as an Expression of Southern Regionalism in Vietnamese History
Claudine Ang Tsu Lyn, Cornell University

Discussant: Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia

1:30- 2:55 p.m.
PANEL VII: Redefining the Feminine:
Gender/Identity Explorations Past and Present

Fleshing the Shadows: Contesting Gender Roles in the Vietnam War (1945-1975)
Thu Anh Vu, University of Northern British Columbia

How the Gun became her Husband: Understanding Revolutionary Mobilization through Women's Memoirs
Natalie Porter, University of Wisconsin

Friendship, Family, and Feminism: Transnational Feminist Analyses of the Lives of Vietnamese Les in Hanoi and Saigon
Natalie Newton, University of California, Irvine

Discussant: Penny Edwards, UC Berkeley

3:05-4:30 p.m.
PANEL VIII: Biopolitics and the Thresholds of Modernity

French-educated Midwives and the Medicalization of Childbirth in Colonial Viet Nam (1900-1940)
Thuy-Linh Nguyen, University of Pennsylvania

Highland Stories: Poverty, Drugs, and Rehabilitation Options in Northern Vietnam
Nathalie Miller, UNESCO Fellow-Vietnam

Migration, Modernity and Manhood: What Shape Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in Late Socialist Vietnam?
Le Minh Giang, Columbia University

Discussant: Alfred Montoya, UC Berkeley

4:40-6:05 p.m.
PANEL IX: The Implications of Ethnicity:
Collapsing State Policies and Social Practices

Vietnamese Engagement with Tamil Migrants in Colonial Indochina
Natasha Pairaudeau, SOAS, University Of London

Protestant Conversion, Social Relations, and the Dilemma of the Hmong in Contemporary Vietnam
Ngo Thi Thanh Tam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Homogenizing (and Inventing) the Vietnamese Nation: The Communist Party Ethnic Policy towards Montagnard Minorities from 1975 to 1986
C�line Marang�, Sciences Po (Paris); Fox Fellow, Yale University

Discussant: Peter Zinoman, UC Berkeley

6:05-6:15 p.m.
Closing remarks

Conference Organizing Committee:  Trang Cao,
Rebekah Collins, Va Cun, Jake Devine, Chi Ha,
Alec Holcombe, Alfred Montoya, Jason Picard, Nu-Anh Tran