Faculty Research Fellow
Nhung Tuyet Tran (Ph.D. History, UCLA, 2004) has intellectual interests that lie at the intersection of decolonial, feminist, legal and religious studies. She is the author of Familial Properties: Gender, State, & Society in Early Modern Vietnam (2018), co-editor of Vietnam: Borderless Histories (Wisconsin, 2006), and “Releasing the Souls: Vietnamese Catholic Identity in the Early Modern Era.” A new project examines Indigenous Cham women’s authority in the context of forced assimilation and Vietnamese settler colonialism in the early modern era. She draws from legal, literary, and religious materials written in classical Vietnamese (the demotic script), literary Sinitic, Akhar thrar (Sanskrit Cham), and European languages in her scholarship.
Fellowship Research Project—Cosmopolitanism, Transimperial Identities, and the Vietnamese Confession Crisis in the Making of the Early Modern Global Church
This study examines how an existential crisis over confession in a North Vietnamese Catholic community prompted local believers to send men of no particular importance across the Indian Ocean and around the African continent to Europe where they were feted by Louis XIV in Paris and Innocent XI in Rome. They went on this mission to demand the attention the attention the duties owed them from European religious and secular leaders. It suggests that the cosmopolitan itineraries of these three catechists triggered the second rites controversy in China, and globally, in 1693. It is a study of how Catholicism as lived and practiced in Vietnam reshaped the global Church in the early modern era and how the demands and actions of Vietnamese believers force us to rethink the field of “Global Catholicism.”