Last summer (2015) at the Engaging With Vietnam conference that was held in Hanoi, scholar Trần Trọng Dương gave a keynote presentation on “The Utility of History: The Case of Medieval Vietnamese History” (Tính hữu dụng của lịch sử: trường hợp lịch sử trung đại Việt Nam).
In this brief presentation, Trần Trọng Dương brought together many of the ideas that he has developed in various articles and books over the past few years.
Seeing how valuable that presentation was as an introduction to Trần Trọng Dương’s scholarship, after the conference I asked Trần Trọng Dương to “re-present” his talk so that I could film it.
At times it was just the two of us, with Trần Trọng Dương talking to an imagined audience and me filming, and at other times I filmed while Trần Trọng Dương presented his ideas while engaging in a conversation with Phan Lê Hà, a scholar and the founder of the Engaging With Vietnam conference series.
It has taken me a long time to get around to making videos out of this material, but here is the first part, and hopefully in the weeks and months ahead I will be able to create videos for the rest of Trần Trọng Dương’s valuable presentation.
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