Celebrating Recent Work by John D. Phan

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by John D. Phan

Among the world’s languages, Vietnamese provides unique insight into the cosmopolitan dynamism of premodern Asia. Modern notions of language history are often constrained by nationalist narratives, focused on bolstering a particular nation’s social, cultural, or political identities. A closer look at the Vietnamese language reveals a rich record of interaction and transformation that does not fit easily within modern nation-state lines or boundaries.

By employing philological, textual, and comparative linguistic methodologies, John D. Phan uncovers the history of a Sinitic language rooted in the Red River Plain of northern Vietnam, which he calls “Annamese Middle Chinese.” The life and death of this language stimulated dramatic transformations in the speech of the region, ultimately giving rise to a new and alloyed language over the early centuries of the second millennium—Vietnamese.

Drawing connections among linguistic, demographic, intellectual, and cultural realities over time, Phan traces the story of the emergence of Vietnamese within the broader context of a cosmopolitan East and Southeast Asia. Lost Tongues of the Red River demonstrates how language forms a surprisingly intimate record of human interaction—one with unique potential to enrich and expand our understanding of the distant past.

About the Author

is an Assistant Professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University. He 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 focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact. 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.

About the Speakers

 has taught in ELAP (formerly AELP) at Montgomery College since 2001. During that time, he has taught a variety of courses: all three tracks of the ELAP program, Chinese 101 to 201, and Linguistics 200. In summer programs at other institutions, he has also taught MA TESOL courses and upper-level linguistics courses at the University of Maryland, McDaniel College, and the University of Hanoi. With ELAP colleagues, he has co-authored a series of college ESL educational materials. He is very active in linguistic research in Southeast Asia, especially related to Vietnamese and Vietnam broadly, and has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society since 2015.

 is the Carpentier Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University. His work focuses on the social and cultural history of middle period and early modern China, drawing questions and sometimes data from cultural anthropology as well as history, and using the methods of the local historian to study elite culture, family and kinship, medicine, religion, gender, and (currently) the changing role and form of Chinese social networks from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen and Way and Byway won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for the best book on pre-1900 China in their years of publication.

 is the Wm. Theodore and Fanny Brett de Bary and Class of 1941 Collegiate Professor of Asian Humanities and Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature at Columbia University. In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy, David Lurie’s research interests include the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; the history of linguistic thought; Japanese mythology; and world philology.

 is the Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Tuttle studies modern Tibetan history, from the 1600s to the 1950s. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in the history of twentieth-century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire is central to all his research. His current research project, “Amdo Tibet, Middle Ground between Lhasa and Beijing (1578-1865),” is a historical analysis of the economic and cultural relations between China and Tibet in the early modern periods.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States