Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Bradley Davis, Professor of History from the Eastern Connecticut State University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract

In 2025, leadership in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam initiated sweeping reforms to the administration of the country. Some territorial units became blended into others and long-standing categories in Vietnamese political geography, such as “city” thành phố and “province” tỉnh either transformed beyond recognition or vanished completely from the map. Despite its seeming novelty, and contrary to the judgments of policy analysts and commentators, these twentieth-century reforms were neither unprecedented nor, from a long-term historical view, entirely unexpected. In fact, we might find their clearest antecedents in reforms launched two centuries ago, when the imperial Vietnamese state sought to enhance its control over people, territory, and resources. Vietnam’s imperial past not only presaged its administrative present, it also opens a view towards possible multicultural futures.

About the Speaker

Bradley Camp Davis examines Vietnamese history with a multicultural and interdisciplinary approach. His publications include Imperial Bandits (University of Washington Press, 2017), which was long-listed for the ICAS book prize, and, as co-editor, a two-volume annotated collection of Yao texts, Sách Cổ Chữ Dao (Hanoi, 2009), and The Cultivated Forest (Washington, 2022) along with research articles in English, Vietnamese, and French. He has held visiting appointments at Université Paris-Cité, the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and, most recently the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript on the multi-species environmental history of imperial Vietnam as well as a book manuscript on the history of administrative reform. Since 2012, he has taught courses on Southeast Asian and world history at Eastern Connecticut State University.