Faculty-Discipline

John Phan

John Phan

Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities

Office: 620 Kent Hall

Current Course Office Hours: Thursdays 10am-12 pm (in-person)

EALAC Undergraduate Program Office Hours: Thursdays 10am-12pm by zoom: https://calendly.com/jp3720/ealac-undergraduate-office-hours

Phone: (212) 854-5744
Email: jp3720@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Saint Olaf College (’02)
MA: Columbia University (’05)
PhD: Cornell University (’12)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1367 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Vietnam
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS 8630 Braided Languages: Diglossia and Cosmopolitanism in Premodern Vietnam
EAAS GU4412 History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia
EAAS UN3710 Fiction & Film in the Making of Modern Vietnams
HSEA GR6300 Vietnamese Studies: Historiography & Methodology

Research Interests

Language as an historical record, Language ethics through time, Translation, Vietnamese
Writing Systems and Vernacular Scripts, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Contact
between China and Vietnam


John Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken
language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political
realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues
of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnames Language,
focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is forthcoming from Harvard
Asia Center Press. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern
Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary
Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical
regionalization of that period. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad
issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical
issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple
languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and
of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically
diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.

For a complete list of publications, please visit his personal website.

Selected Publications
“Sesquisyllabicity,  Chữ Nôm, and the Early Modern embrace of vernacular writing in Vietnam.” In Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Online First advance version (2020), pp. 1-14.
“Vietnamese Lexicographic Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019). Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, pp. 356-365.
“The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic,” Journal of World Literature (2016)

“Rebooting the Vernacular in 17th Century Vietnam,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919 (Brill, 2014)

“Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2013)

Gregory M. Pflugfelder

Gregory Pflugfelder

Associate Professor

Office: 408 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 4:00–5:30 PM (walk-in basis), or by appointment (via Zoom)
Phone: (212) 854-5035
Email: gmp12@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Harvard University (’81)
MA: Waseda University (’84)
PhD: Stanford University (’96)

Classes Taught
ASCE UN1361 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Japan
HSEA UN3871 Modern Japan: Images and Words
HSEA GR6009 Graduate Colloquium on Early Modern Japan
EAAS UN3888 Cultural History of Japanese Monsters
Research Interests

Early-Modern and Modern Japanese History, Gender, Sexuality, Visual Culture

Gregory Pflugfelder specializes in Japanese history and gender studies. He received his A.B. from Harvard, his M.A. from Waseda, and his Ph.D. from Stanford. His books include Seiji to daidokoro: Akita-ken joshi sanseiken undōshi (Politics and the kitchen: a history of the women’s suffrage movement in Akita prefecture), which received the 1986 Yamakawa Kikue Prize, and Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. His current work engages the the historical construction of masculinities, the history of the body, and representations of monstrosity.

Selected Publications

“The Nation-State, the Age/Gender System, and the Reconstitution of Erotic Desire in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies (2012)

Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (University of California, 1999)

JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life (co-editor, University of Michigan, 2005)

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Office: 926 IAB
Office Hours: R 1-2:30 pm and by appointment
Phone Number: (212) 854-0129
Email: ln2358@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Yale University, 2008
BA: University of Pennsylvania, 1996

Classes Taught

The Vietnam War
The United States and East Asia
The Wars for Indochina
Southest Asia & the World

Research Interests

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, specializes in the Vietnam War, U.S.-Southeast Asian relations, and the global Cold War. Professor Nguyen is currently working on a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive for RandomHouse. She is the general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols., as well as co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations.

Selected Publications

Books

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Tet 1968: The Battles that Changed the Vietnam War and the Global Cold War (New York: Random House, forthcoming).

Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Scholarly Articles

“Revolutionary Circuits: Toward Internationalizing America in the World,” Diplomatic History 39, Issue 3 (June 2015): 411-422.

“1968: Negotiating While Fighting or Just Fighting?” in Eds. Pierre Journoud and Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, Vietnam, 1968-1976: Exiting a War (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011).

“The Vietnam Decade: The Global Shock of the War,” in Eds. Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

“Waging War on All Fronts: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War, 1969-1972” in Eds. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Cold War Contradictions: Toward an International History of the Second Indochina War, 1969-1973” in Eds. Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young, Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Sino-Vietnamese Split in the Post-Tet War in Indochina, 1968-1975” in Eds. Sophie Quinn-Judge and Odd Arne Westad, The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-1979 (London: Routledge Press, 2006).

“Vietnamese Perceptions of the French-Indochina War” in Eds. Fredrik Logevall and Mark Lawrence, Indochina in the Balance: New Perspectives on the First Vietnam War.  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

“The War Politburo: Vietnam’s Diplomatic and Political Road to the Tet Offensive,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1-2 (February/August 2006).