Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen, 17-19th centuries; Catholicism in early modern southern Vietnam; and the interactions of Chinese and local peoples in 19th Vietnam and Cambodia.

My doctorate on the relationship between French political myth and colonial politics in Central Vietnam (Annam) in the early colonial era (1897-1925) created an interest in researching the antecedents of the colonial Vietnamese political elite of central Vietnam. From there my research expanded to consider the influence of its pre-dynastic southern heritage on the political and administrative life of the nineteenth-century Nguyen Empire and its ruling elite. One of my two current research interests builds on this by using French missionary archives to illuminate the 17th and 18th century history of Nguyen Cochinchina (modern central to southern Vietnam) and the history of Vietnamese Catholicism there. My other research focus, on Chinese in Vietnam and Cambodia, arises from my participation in an ARC-funded project researching commercial and other interactions between Chinese and local peoples and regimes in the 19th-century.