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.​