Events

Join author Kevin Nguyen for a discussion of his acclaimed 2025 novel Mỹ Documents, followed by a conversation with Columbia University’s Writer-in-Residence Marie Myung-Ok Lee.

The novel follows a Vietnamese American family whose lives are upended by government detention policies, exploring themes of identity, displacement, racism, and family through a story inspired by historical and contemporary events.

Event details and in-person registration: https://cser.columbia.edu/cser.../my-documents-book-talk/

Non-Columbia attendees should email cser@columbia.edu to arrange campus access.

The same Chinese character, 月 (moon), can be used to represent words meaning “moon” in several East Asian languages, even though their pronunciations are entirely different: yuè in Mandarin Chinese, tsuki in Japanese, and dal in Korean.

This phenomenon led many seventeenth-century European scholars to believe that Chinese characters represented ideas directly rather than words, and could therefore serve as a universal system of communication among communities speaking different languages.

But can Chinese characters truly exist independently of spoken language?

In the lecture “When Wor(l)ds Collide: Chinese Characters, East Asian Writing, and Ideographic Universalism” at Columbia University, Professor Zev Handel (University of Washington) will examine this longstanding assumption from the perspectives of historical linguistics and writing systems.

Tracing the spread and adaptation of Chinese characters across Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the lecture explores a distinctive feature of this writing system: Chinese characters are not purely ideographic symbols, yet they possess a remarkable flexibility that allows them to be adapted to represent different languages.

For anyone interested in Chinese characters, chữ Nôm, the history of writing systems, and intellectual exchange across East Asia, this is a particularly compelling topic to explore.

Speaker: Professor Zev Handel, University of Washington

Organizers: Critical Chinese Humanities Colloquium, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and other co-sponsoring institutions at Columbia University.

For more information and registration, click here.

Digitizing Việt Nam is pleased to introduce the upcoming online seminar “Lĩnh Nam chích quái: Multidimensional Perspectives from Textual Traditions to Regional Cultural Exchange,” part of the Vietnamese Culture Forum series, jointly organized by the Vietnam Studies Center (VSC) at Fulbright University Vietnam and the University of Hamburg, Germany.

As one of the most representative works of medieval Vietnamese literature, Lĩnh Nam chích quái preserves legends concerning the origins, history, and spiritual life of the Vietnamese people. Beyond its significance to Vietnam's cultural heritage, the work also offers valuable insights into the formation, transmission, and transformation of texts within the broader cultural landscape of East Asia.

During the seminar, Associate Professor Dr. Nguyễn Thị Oanh, author of Lĩnh Nam chích quái: Critical Study, Annotated Translation, and Original Classical Chinese Text (Social Sciences Publishing House, 2024), will explore the work from multiple perspectives, including its textual history, intellectual traditions of the Lý–Trần dynasties, linguistic features of Classical Chinese, and shared narrative motifs and story types across Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese literature.

📅 Date & Time: 7:30–9:00 PM, Friday, October 23, 2026 (Vietnam Time)

💻 Format: Online via Zoom Zoom 

Meeting ID: 623 1776 1046 

Passcode: 82871834

🔗 Registration: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/W9gia7Wawj

Digitizing Việt Nam would like to share an upcoming online talk for those interested in the application of AI to historical research:

History+AI: The Promise and Peril of LLMs to Historical Research

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

3:00 PM (Vietnam Time) | 4:00 PM (Hong Kong Time)

Online via Zoom

Speaker: Prof. Florin-Stefan Morar

Assistant Professor of History & Director, History+AI Lab, National University of Singapore (NUS)

What can Large Language Models (LLMs) contribute to historical research—and what might they cause historians to overlook?

Through three projects—Science and Emotions, The Pulse of History, and CROSS—Prof. Florin-Stefan Morar will explore how AI is entering the historian’s research process, from navigating and exploring large collections to developing and testing historical interpretations.

Alongside the new possibilities these tools offer, the talk will also address important concerns: LLMs may smooth over uncertainties inherent in historical sources, reproduce gaps and biases in archives, or generate persuasive answers without sufficient supporting evidence.

At the heart of the talk is a critical question: How can historians make effective use of LLMs while ensuring that AI-generated outputs remain open to scrutiny and historical claims remain grounded in sources?

Prof. Morar’s research brings together global history, the history of science and technology, and computational methods. He is the author of Connected Cartographies: World Geography and the Sino-Western Translation of Knowledge, 1580–1842 (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

 Register here

Digitizing Việt Nam is pleased to share this Vietnamese Culture Forum event, co-organized by Fulbright University Vietnam’s Vietnam Studies Center and Universität Hamburg. Dr. Chung Hoàng Chương will explore historical and cultural sources on the spread of Buddhist traditions along the Mekong River and the development of religious traditions in the Mekong Delta. Dr. Nguyễn Nam will moderate.

Time: Friday, October 9, 2026, 14:30–16:00 CEST / 19:30–21:00 Vietnam time

Venue: Online via Zoom

Meeting ID: 641 5673 0755

Passcode: 56253122

How have Khmer objects traveled across Southeast Asia and beyond? And what can their journeys tell us about the histories of collecting, museums, and cultural heritage?

Center for Khmer Studies and École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) Siem Reap Center invite you to join a full-day online seminar bringing together more than 30 scholars, archaeologists, museum professionals, provenance researchers, heritage practitioners, and legal experts from around the world.

Through a series of case studies, the seminar will examine the complex journeys of Khmer objects and the questions that arise when reconstructing their histories.

Registration remains open. Free registration is required to receive the Zoom link, click here.

Speaker: Dr. Richard Pegg, Director and Curator of Asian Art, MacLean Collection

Date and Time: October 3, 2026, at 12:00 AM (Vietnam Time)

Format: Online via Zoom

Register here.

How can historical maps help us reconstruct the networks of trade, diplomacy, and movement that once connected Vietnam to the wider maritime worlds of East and Southeast Asia?

Digitizing Vietnam is pleased to share an upcoming lecture by Dr. Richard Pegg, Director and Curator of Asian Art at the MacLean Collection, organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University (NIU).

Drawing on maps produced between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Dr. Pegg will examine the complex and interconnected systems of exchange that shaped the South China Sea and East China Sea. These include the Red Seal Ship trade, Manila trade networks, Siamese and Fujianese trading networks, the Zheng family maritime network, silver–silk and rice–silk exchanges, the tributary system, Muslim merchant networks, and Portuguese, British, and Dutch trading systems.

During these centuries, Vietnam's trading ports and coastal communities were embedded in extensive commercial networks connecting China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the wider trading worlds of the Indian Ocean and Europe. Examining these networks through historical cartography offers an alternative perspective on Vietnam's place in a connected, transregional maritime history, rather than viewing its past solely through the boundaries of modern nation-states.

The event is organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University (NIU), with co-sponsorship from NIU's Center for Burma Studies, School of Art and Design, Art Museum, and Department of History.