Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Martina Thucnhi Nguyen from Baruch College at City University of New York, who will discuss Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh's gendered writing strategy. Dr. Nguyen obtained PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Dr. Nguyen serves as Associate Professor of History at Baruch College at City University of New York.

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

About the Talk

In 1907, a series of articles titled “Women’s words” (Nhời Đàn Bà) appeared in Đăng Cổ Tùng Báo (Old Lantern Miscellany) under the name Đaò Thị Loan. Loan was arguably one of the earliest female voices in the modern Vietnamese vernacular press, covering a wide range of women’s issues such as concubinage, childbirth, hygiene, etiquette, and parenting. As it turns out, Đào Thị Loan was not a woman, but in fact, a man writing under a female pseudonym. And not just any man, but Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh, one of the most illustrious Vietnamese intellectuals of the early 20th century. Vĩnh would go on to write this column under the same pseudonym in two subsequent journals he founded, Đông Dương Tạp Chí (Indochina Journal, 1913-14) and Trung Bắc Tân Văn (Central and Northern News, 1915-17). In this 10 year period, Vĩnh penned over 100 articles on women’s issues, one of his most sustained bodies of writing. This paper delves into the column’s content and context to argue that Vĩnh’s adoption of a female persona–that is, writing betwixt and between genders–can be read as both a political and creative act, one which projected an idealized vision of modern Vietnamese gender relations that ultimately benefited men.

About the Speaker

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. An historian of modern Southeast Asia, her research focuses on colonialism, intellectual life, social and political reform, and gender in twentieth century Vietnam. Her first book, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tu Luc Văn Đoàn) and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, was published in 2021 by University of Hawai’i Press as part of Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Studies Institute book series. She is currently working on her second book, a gender history of patriarchy, examining how Vietnamese during the late colonial period actively constructed ideologies of sexual difference and wove these gendered categories into the very fabric of Vietnamese national identity.​

One of the key challenges stemming from climate change will be climate displacement, as sudden and gradual events disrupt livelihoods and force millions to leave their homes. Despite the existing scholarship’s focus on cross-border movement, the majority of climate displaced people will move internally instead of or before seeking refuge outside their nation’s borders. What obligations do states owe to their citizens when those states have historically not been emitters but have still failed to protect domestic populations from displacement related to environmental disasters and climate change impacts? Through exploring the disaster management framework in Colombia and conducting a case study of the town of Gramalote, this talk discusses the obligations that states like Colombia owe to their internally displaced populations in the context of climate change. Given the inexorability and foreseeability of climate displacement, this talk argues that states have an obligation to recognize climate displacement, plan ahead to protect their populations’ rights, and implement best practices under international human rights law throughout relocation and resettlement processes. Irrespective of the driver of displacement, displaced individuals should not be subject to a bifurcated regime of protection that treats displacement due to civil disruption, violence, or armed conflict distinctly from displacement in the context of climate change and environmental disasters.

About the Speaker
Camila Bustos is an Assistant Professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Before joining Haub Law, Professor Bustos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights. She also served as a term law clerk to Justice Steven D. Ecker of the Connecticut Supreme Court and as a consultant with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).

Professor Bustos graduated from Yale Law School, where she received the Francis Wayland Prize and was a Switzer Foundation Fellow and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. She worked at the Center for Climate Integrity, the Climate Litigation Network, and EarthRights International during law school. Professor Bustos also co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability, a national law student-led movement pushing the legal industry to phase out fossil fuel representation and support a just, livable future. Prior to law school, she worked as a human rights researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in Colombia.

Professor Bustos’s research and scholarship focus on human rights law, environmental law, legal ethics, and climate change law.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-sponsor
Migrations Program
Cornell Law School
Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability