Research Areas

My unpublished 2004 Ph.D. dissertation (History Department, SOAS, 2004) looked at how Vietnamese anti-colonial organization such as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Vietnamese Communist Party competed with the Military Intelligence Service and the Sûreté over the allegiance of the Vietnamese soldiers who served France in French Indochina (and beyond) during the 1927 to 1939 period.

I continue to be interested in the topic of Vietnamese soldiers, for instance with regard to the mortality rates of the soldiers and worker-soldiers who were serving in France and parts of the Mediterranean during WW1, but also with regard to their public commemoration. An extension of this is my interest in the Vietnamese soldiers (and worker-soldiers) during WW2 in France, French Indochina, and in Shanghai during and immediately after WW2, notably with regard to their political choices.

Apart from that, I have a particular interest in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party’s Yen Bay mutiny of February 1930 (I have a published paper on this, see Papers section of my webpage), as well the Nghe Tinh Soviets of 1930-31 (work in progress).

I have maintained an interest in colonial soldiers, as for instance in my book co-edited with Karl Hack on Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2006; pbk 2009). You can read two reviews of this publication at the Papers section of this website. What I like about the book is that it does not only look at Western colonial armies and militias in the region (i.e. the French, the British, the Dutch, and the Americans), but also at post-colonial memories of colonial armies (in Malaysia or Singapore) and at Asian imperial forces (e.g. the Ming Chinese, and the Indonesians).

Finally, I have a general interest in women warriors in the Southeast Asia region, and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the Indian National Army in particular.