Thursday, February 2 / 4PM
HOMER BABBIDGE LIBRARY Class of 1947 Room
“Outlaws and Rebels in 19th Century Vietnam-China Borderlands”
Book Launch and Guest Lecture by Bradley C. Davis
This talk contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, showing that, as a setting for many forms of human activity, borderlands continue to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries. Brad Davis tells this lively history of flexible division between apolitical banditry and political rebellion in the borderlands of China and Vietnam through the Black Flags and their rivals as they competed for control of commerce and natural resources at the edges of three empires – the Qing in China, the Vietnamese empire governed by the Nguyen dynasty, and eventually, French Colonial Vietnam.
Bradley Camp Davis is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) in Willimantic, CT. He received his Master of Arts in International Studies, China Studies (2002) from the Jackson School of International Studies, and Ph.D. (2008) in History from the University of Washington. Prof. Davis has completed his book manuscript on the China-Vietnam borderlands during the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on borderlands powerbrokers and trans-regional groups – this publication is scheduled for release in January 2017 from University of Washington Press, entitled Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands. A second manuscript project concerns productions of ethnographic knowledge in Qing China and Nguyen Vietnam, specifically the role of ethnography as an imperial repertoire and Vietnamese notions of Empire before French colonialism.
Sponsored by the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute, this event is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact: Ms. Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu