Biography

Nhung Tuyet Tran is Associate Professor in History at the University of Toronto. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, the law, and religion in early modern Southeast Asia. She is the author of Familial Properties: Gender, State and Society in Early Modern Vietnam (Hawai’i 2018), co-author, with Hoang et al., of The Exclusion of Women’s Access to Property in Viet Nam (United Nations Development Programme 2012), co-editor, with Anthony Reid, of Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Wisconsin 2006), among other works of scholarship and translation. She has completed a cultural history of Vietnamese Catholicism, entitled “Releasing the Souls: Vietnamese Catholic Identity in the Early Modern Era,” and continues to work on the history of early modern Catholicism and gender, property, and Indigeneity.
 

Project Summary

Tran will work on two projects which examine, from a Vietnamese location, the relationship between the Roman church and Indigenous communities of believers in the early modern world. The main project is a microhistory of how a dispute over confession in Viet Nam reshaped Rome’s relationship with the early modern world. In the project, she explores how an existential crisis over the sacrament of confession in the seventeenth century prompted local believers by sending their representatives to demand answers from ecclesiastical and secular leaders in Asia and Europe. In December 1687, three Viet believers boarded a Dutch East India Company boat and sailed from Ayuthaya to Batavia, through the straits of Madagascar to the Dutch Cape Colony, to Paris and then, to Rome.The circumstances of the visit reignited old rivalries in the Asian church, triggered the (second) rites controversy in China and its counterparts in Malabar, Latin America, and Africa, and led Roman officials to redouble their efforts at enforcing the Tridentine reforms. Tran locates historically how Rome’s renewed claims of universality and its imperial ambitions were reactions to the strength and vitality of Indigenous believers’ claims to their rightful place in the global church: as souls as worthy of salvation than any other. At the same time, she will begin a translation project, “The Acta Sanctorum in Vietnamese,” which explores the links between its Vietnamese version, the product of a dialogue between the Neapolitan Jesuit and a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, circulated between 1636 and 1640, and the first two volumes of the European version, printed in 1643.