By /

VATTHANA PHOLSENA

Specialisations:

Ethnicity
Memory studies
Wars and revolutions
Borderland studies

Vatthana Pholsena graduated from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Institute of Political Studies, also known as 'Sciences Po') in Grenoble, France in 1997, before moving to the U.K. to pursue her Ph.D. at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hull. She first came to Singapore in 2002 on a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute. Subsequently, she worked as a Research Fellow in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS; National Centre for Scientific Research) for over a decade, based at the Institut d’Asie Orientale (Institute of East Asian Studies) in Lyon and at the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (Southeast Asia Centre) in Paris.

 

Brief Introduction
Brief Introduction

I began my research trajectory in the late 1990s investigating issues relating to ethnicity, nationhood and citizenship in Laos, particularly amongst men and women who belonged to ethnic minority groups and who had been involved in the American (Vietnam) War and then the socialist project. The French and American Wars in Mainland Southeast Asia have been a constant theme in my research. I have explored their narratives, remembrances and legacies, especially in Laos. I have worked in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands and studied the uneven transformation of a ‘borderless land’ into a ‘state space’ in the course of these violent conflicts. My current research focuses on the Lao-Thai borderlands and the reconstitution of a social and multi-ethnic history of the Cold War in this region.

Teaching Areas
Research Interests
Publications
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