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)

Southeast Asia