Dr. Phan Thu Van is currently a researcher and lecturer in East Asian literature, Chairperson of the Division of Foreign Literature, and Vice-dean of the Department of Literature and Linguistics, at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Sino-Vietnamese studies from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities, she spent 7 years in China to learn about Ancient Literary Chinese and Chinese Literature, graduating from Fudan University (Shanghai, China), with a Master’s degree in 2007 and a Ph.D. in 2010.
She served as a visiting teacher of Sino-Vietnamese at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities (2015 – 2019), and was invited to participate for three consecutive years (2017 – 2019) in the Cultural exchange program at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan as a visiting professor of Vietnamese literature and culture in the East Asian context. She was also invited to give a lecture for the Japan Foundation’s Close-up Japan program in June 2021.
She has participated in many national and international conferences on East Asian literature and Vietnamese studies in countries including China, Korea, and The United States of America.
In 2016, Dr. Phan Thu Van won the fourth prize of the Inoue Yasushi Award for her writing about Inoue Yasushi’s The warrior and the Wolf. In 2017, she received the second prize in the same competition for her essay on Yasushi’s historical stories. In 2018, she got the first prize of the Yasushi Award for the research of Yasushi’s novel Tonko and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant.
She is the translator of various works, including Lust, Caution (2009) and Making a world of difference: The Kai-Fu Lee story (2016). She is the author of Inoue Yasushi – The journey of dreams, a research book published in Vietnam, as well as the co-author of the Insect Humanities (곤충인문학) monograph published in Korea in 2021. Her research interests include East Asian literature, East Asian thought, comparative literature, adaptation studies, and Sino-Vietnamese.
