Organizer: Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Type/Location: Hybrid / New York, NY
Description:
Join the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University for a book talk by Charles Keith, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.
About the Book:
From the nineteenth century until decolonization, as European administrators, missionaries, and businessmen streamed into new colonies around Asia and Africa, colonial subjects traveled to Europe. This talk, based on the new book Subjects and Sojourners (University of California Press, 2024), explores how French colonial rule in Indochina extended Indochina’s colonial society into France. Perhaps two hundred thousand Indochinese sojourned in France between conquest in the 1850s and decolonization a century later. They came from all parts of colonial society, from ruling monarchs to the most marginal laborers. In France, they studied, labored, fought, and lived in contexts that, although still within the empire, were profoundly different from their places of origin. Their French sojourns were socially, culturally, and politically transformative. And when these sojourners returned to Indochina, virtually all parts of colonial society bore traces of their experiences abroad.
About the Speaker:
Charles Keith received his Ph.D. from Yale in 2008, and is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church From Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2012), which received the 2015 Harry J. Benda Book Prize (Association for Asian Studies), the 2013 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize (French Colonial Historical Society), and the 2013 John Gilmary Shea Book Prize (American Catholic Historical Association). He served as co-editor in chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies from 2018-2022.
Moderator: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Dorothy Borg Chair in the History of the United States and East Asia, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00 pm on March 11 for campus access.
To attend the event virtually, please register here.