Ben Tran

Assistant Professor
Asian Studies

Ben Tran is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University.  His research and teaching focus on modern Vietnamese literature and culture, twentieth-century Southeast Asian literature, postcolonial studies, colonial modernity, and translation studies.  His current book project, Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Modernism in Colonial Vietnam, examines the radical rupture of Vietnam’s literary and intellectual fields—from the mandarinal system to print capitalism.  The project analyses the displaced situation of the post-World War I Vietnamese writer as French colonial policies reorganized the cultural fields, illuminating the complex relations between colonial history, print capitalism, and the emergence of indigenous modern literatures.  His publications include “Queer Internationalism and Modern Vietnamese Aesthetics” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms; and “I Speak in the Third Person: Women and Language in Colonial Vietnam” in positions: Asia Critique (forthcoming vol. 21, summer 2013).  He has an essay forthcoming in PMLA on the Vietnamese translation of Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy.  He teaches classes in both Asian Studies and English, including the bildungsroman in Asia, cultural representations of the Vietnam War, “Third World” and literature, and postcolonial theory and literature.