Background

Born and raised in Incheon, South Korea, Byun Kyuduck has always been interested in history from when he was young. After entering the Department of History at Inha University, he studied both Asian history and Western history as well as Korean history. However, he had fallen in love with the history of Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam since 2015.

In his undergraduate days, he majored in history and minored in public administration. After graduation, he continued his study in Vietnamese history and obtained his M.A. degree from Inha University in 2022 with his thesis project on the Vietnamese emperorship in the early Lý dynasty.

For his PhD study, Kyuduck would like to explore many countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore. He would also like to widen his knowledge and make good relationships with the scholars here at NUS.

Asian Languages

Kyuduck is a native speaker of Korean and has intermediate proficiency in Vietnamese. He can read classical Chinese and Japanese and also learned Mandarin Chinese for a while.

Research Interests

Kyuduck is interested in Vietnamese history, especially Vietnamese kingship, which he has already covered in his M.A. study. The kingship in the pre-modern period was an element that encompasses the politics, economy, society, and culture of a country, and was an important symbol directly linked to the national identity. Based on this perspective, Kyuduck would now like to compare the kingships of Vietnam and Korea. Also, during the pre-modern era, Korea and Vietnam continued to exchange within the East Asian international order centered on China. Hence, by comparatively researching the kingships of the two countries, it will act as an important key for doing the history of relationship between Korea and Vietnam.