John Phan

Educational Background

BA: Saint Olaf College (’02)
MA: Columbia University (’05)
PhD: Cornell University (’12)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1367 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Vietnam
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS 8630 Braided Languages: Diglossia and Cosmopolitanism in Premodern Vietnam
EAAS GU4412 History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia
EAAS UN3710 Fiction & Film in the Making of Modern Vietnams
HSEA GR6300 Vietnamese Studies: Historiography & Methodology

Research Interests

Language as an historical record, Language ethics through time, Translation, Vietnamese Writing Systems and Vernacular Scripts, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Contact between China and Vietnam

John Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language, focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is forthcoming from Harvard Asia Center Press. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical regionalization of that period. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and
of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.

For a complete list of publications, please visit his personal website

Selected Publications

“Sesquisyllabicity,  Chữ Nôm, and the Early Modern embrace of vernacular writing in Vietnam.” In Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Online First advance version (2020), pp. 1-14.

“Vietnamese Lexicographic Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019). Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, pp. 356-365.

“The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic,” Journal of World Literature (2016)

“Rebooting the Vernacular in 17th Century Vietnam,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919 (Brill, 2014)

“Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2013)