2013 Vietnam Update: Speakers Biographies
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COLLEGE OF ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
VIETNAM UPDATE: SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES
Jonathan D. London is a professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies at the City
University of Hong Kong. His interests concern the political economy of East Asia, though his
research has focused mostly on Viet Nam. Jonathan’s scholarship examines numerous aspects of
social life in Viet Nam within the context of continuity and change in that country’s political,
economic, and welfare institutions. His publications include Education in Viet Nam (ISEAS 2011),
Politics in Contemporary Viet Nam (Palgrave-Macmillan forthcoming) and numerous peer-reviewed
articles and book chapters. Also Jonathan has consulted to the United Nations Development
Program and Unicef in Viet Nam. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Tu Dang is Deputy Director General of the National Financial Supervisory Commission (NFSC), in
charge of financial stability reports to Prime Minister. Before that, he had 12 years working for the
Ministry of Finance as a senior economist. His research areas are macro-prudential supervision,
monetary economics and applied econometrics. He has co-authored several comparative studies on
vulnerability to poverty in countries in Asia and the Pacific and on inflation variability and the
relationship between inflation and growth, with publications appearing in journals such as the
European Journal of Comparative Economics, the Asian Economic Journal and Economic Change and
Restructuring. He holds a PhD from the Australian National University (ANU).
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Tuong Vu is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. His book, Paths to
Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia (Cambridge 2010), received a 2011
Bernard Schwartz Award Honorable Mention. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of
Vietnamese Studies and is co-editor of Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and
Culture (Palgrave 2009) and Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative
Analysis (Stanford 2008). He has published in scholarly journals, including World Politics, Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Studies in Comparative International
Development, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, South East Asia Research, and Theory and
Society. Currently he is completing a book about the Vietnamese revolution as a case of radical
movements in international politics. He holds a PhD from Berkeley.
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Thiem Hai Bui is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Queensland and deputy
director of Department for General Affairs at the Institute for Legislative Studies (ILS) of the National
Assembly Standing Committee of Vietnam. His research has been published in international peerreviewed scholarly journals like the Global Chance, Peace and Security and the Global Studies Journal
and Vietnamese journals such as the Communist Review and the Journal of Legislative Studies.
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2013 Vietnam Update: Speakers Biographies
Bui Ngoc Son is lecturer at Vietnam National University–Hanoi, PhD candidate at University of Hong
Kong, and a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University (October, 2013). His scholarly interests include
Vietnamese constitutional issues; law and culture; political theories; and the relationship between
Confucianism and constitutionalism. He has published extensively in Vietnamese on constitutional
law and political philosophy. His English publications appear in Australian Journal of Legal
Philosophy, National Taiwan University Law Review, Journal of Oriental Studies, and Chinese Journal
of Comparative Law.
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Ben Kerkvliet, Emeritus Professor at the ANU, is currently doing research on public political criticism
in Vietnam. One resulting publication is “Workers’ Protests in Contemporary Vietnam (with some
comparisons to those in the Pre-1975 South),” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 5:1 (2010): 162–204.
Among his other publications about Vietnam is The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese
Peasants Transformed National Policy (Cornell University Press 2005). Ben has also published widely
on agrarian politics elsewhere in Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines.
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John Gillespie is a professor of law and director of the Asian Regulatory Group in the Department of
Business Law, Monash University. His research and teaching interests include East Asian comparative
law, law and development theory, regulatory theory and land disputes. He has published widely on
these topics and his most recent books are (with M. Dowdle and I Maher) eds., Asian Capitalism and
the Regulation of Competition: Towards a Regulatory Geography of Global Competition Law
(Cambridge 2013) and (with Pip Nicholson) eds., Law and Development and the Global Discourses of
Legal Transfers (Cambridge 2012). He has also consulted to international donors such as the World
Bank, UNDP, IFC, Danida, Asia Foundation and AusAID on legal development projects in East Asia.
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Philip Taylor is an anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology, ANU who has been conducting
research in the Mekong delta since the early 1990s. He has lived for five years in this region and
speaks Vietnamese and Khmer. He is the sole author of four books on the history, religious life and
ethnic communities of Southern Vietnam, along with numerous scholarly articles in journals such as
Modern Asian Studies, the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and the Australian Journal of Anthropology,
among others. He has edited three multi-author volumes on contemporary Vietnam stemming from
the Vietnam Update conference series. He is Editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology,
published by Taylor and Francis.
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Nguyen Trinh Minh Anh is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Environmental Science of
Okayama University, Japan. His initial study in natural resource use in upland Vietnam led him to an
interest in how the world of indigenous peoples in these mountainous frontiers changed as a result
of institutionalization. Before researching his PhD, he was working for a local organization in Thua
Thien Hue province to raise rural community’s environmental awareness.
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Bui Thi Bich Lien is a PhD candidate in the Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash
University. Her research focuses on the interactions between regulatory communities in resolving
2013 Vietnam Update: Speakers Biographies
civil disputes in Vietnam. Before commencing her PhD, Lien worked in Vietnam for 18 years in the
legal profession. This included work at Hanoi Law University; commercial law practice for
Baker&McKenzie and Vietnam International Law Firm; and law reform projects for the Asia
Foundation, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the European Union.
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Thai Huynh Phuong Lan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture,
History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU. Her research interests are on
ethnicity and gender relations, with current research focusing on the harmony and conflict in the
married lives of Khmer–Kinh mixed couples. Lan started her PhD at the ANU in 2011. Before that,
she followed and completed her MSc degree in Gender and Development Studies in Asian Institute
of Technology in Thailand from 2007 to 2009, with her thesis focusing on “Gender Impacts of Crossborder Works”. Lan has been working as a lecturer in An Giang Univeristy in Vietnam since 2005.
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Thai Thi Ngoc Du is currently director of Gender and Society Research Center at Hoa Sen University,
Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. Throughout her career Ngoc Du has made every effort to revive the field
of social sciences in Vietnamese higher education. She pioneered the creation of Gender Studies and
Social Work at the Open University. She has participated in numerous domestic and international
conferences on women’s issues and environmental preservation, and has led research efforts and
authored publications on both subjects at a time when such fields of endeavour were on the minds
of few Vietnamese.
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Tran Van Kham
Tran Van Kham is working in University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National
University–Hanoi as vice-director of Office for Research Affairs. He graduated the BA and MA in
Sociology from Vietnam National University–Hanoi and completed his PhD in Social Work and Social
Policy from University of South Australia in 2012. His main research interests are social inclusion;
community development; people with disabilities in Vietnam; and contemporary youth studies and
youth value orientation in Vietnam.
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Duc Anh Do completed his PhD degree on “Television, Urbanisation and Development in Hanoi, the
capital city of Vietnam” in 2012. His research investigated television use and perceptions of the new
rural-urban migrants residing in Hanoi, and the ideological role of television in relation to their daily
lives. He has presented academic papers at international conferences held in China, Sweden,
Vietnam and Australia.
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