Sources for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian History

This course features a survey of Vietnamese and Southeast historical traditions. Students will be introduced to Southeast Asian approaches to not only recording but also dealing with the past to orient people of the present. Lectures will feature the main mediums used to reconstruct history in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia such as stone and temple inscriptions, imperial annals, family chronicles, royal chronicles, genealogies, narratives etc.
Students will also get the unique opportunity to analyze rare and unknown historical sources such as Cham historical narratives from Vietnam and Cambodia, Cham chronicles, Cham genealogies from Cambodia, as well as Khmer narratives and family chronicles. Students will be provided with original texts and will be guided through the methods for analyzing such texts. If translations of such texts are not already available, students will be provided with translations in English by the instructor.