My current project attempts to link two simultaneous developments in the history of the South China Sea: the diffusion of Chinese overseas trade and shipping networks across maritime Asia, and the southern expansion of Vietnamese settlement and rule down the eastern Indochinese peninsula in the early modern period. I trace the development and decline of Chinese-dominated trade in Hoi An-known to Europeans as Faifo-a central Vietnamese port city that served as a key entrepot in the South China Sea trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Using essentially an Annales approach, the study develops a regional history of overseas trade, defined by the port's rivershed, set within the larger context of the Bien Dong (aka, South China Sea) as its own distinct maritime region. My work shows how cross-cultural, maritime trade influenced historical patterns within a particular geographical region-in this case, the southern Vietnamese realm of Dang Trong (Cochinchina), ruled by the Nguyen clan. Specifically, it shows how enterprising Chinese merchants set their own diasporic society firmly into the rapidly changing political, economic, and cultural landscape of peninsular Southeast Asia, and through relationships built upon trans-state institutions of clan, ethnicity, occupation and religion, helped to re-define the political, social and cultural configurations of historically Cham and Khmer territories and re-orient local identities towards Vietnamese norms. As a result, by the dawn of the nineteenth century, the contours of a Vietnamese territory under a Vietnamese state as we know it, and with it, a subject population identifiably Vietnamese, could be thus imagined. I am currently expanding my research to encompass Buddhist monastic networks, which played a central role in the organization of diasporic, maritime Chinese merchant society, and helped to fuse the interests of merchants and monarchs within Buddhist worlds. I am pursuing this problem through the life of a Guangzhou monk named Shi Dashan (V: Thich Dai Son), and his controversial voyage to Dang Trong in 1695 and 1696. My teaching and research focus on similar issues. My Silk Roads in Asia course seeks to introduce students to importance of cross-cultural exchanges and its impact on early world history, as well as how ancient European fascination with the "Silk Road" shaped modern scholarship of Asia. Through my courses on Southeast Asian history and the American War in Viet Nam, I emphasize the importance of local societies and trans-state cultural institutions in shaping political economies and cultural identities.

Charles Wheeler Ph.D., Yale University, 2001 For a full CV click here. Assistant Professor of History Department of History Murray Krieger Hall Irvine, CA 92697-3275 tel: 949.824.2236 fax: 949.824.2865 email: cwheeler@uci.edu Fields of Interest: Vietnam, Maritime China, South China Sea, World. Publications: Book in Progress “The Ecology of Empire: Hoi An Seaport and the Production of Central Vietnam.” Book mss. Articles “A Coastal Panorama of the Peregrinação: Placing Mendes Pinto in Vietnamese and Cham Social History.” In Fernão Mendes Pinto e a Peregrinação: Viagens, Visoes, e Encontros (Lisboa: Fundaçao Oriente, forthcoming). “A Hydrographic Perspective on Cham Political Economy.” In New Scholarship on Champa ed. Bruce Lockart & Tran Ky Phuong (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, forthcoming). “One History, Two Regions: Cham Precedents in the History of the Hoi An Region.” In Viet Nam: Borderless Histories, ed. Nhung Tran & Anthony Reid (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). “Geographical Imagery and the Problem of Vietnam’s ‘Center’: The Littoral Integration of Thuan-Quang, 17th-18th Centuries” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17.1 (February 2006). “Silk Roads into Vietnamese History.” Education about Asia, Special Issue: Teaching Asia in World History 300CE-1500CE (Winter 2005). Miscellaneous “History of Indochina, 1859-1940” and “The Wars for Vietnam: 1945-54.” In The World and Its Peoples (Brown Reference Group, forthcoming). “Alexandre de Rhodes” and “South China Sea.” In History of World Trade Since 1450 (MacMillan, 2005). Book Reviews Southern Vietnam under the Reign of Minh Mang (1820-1841): Central Policies and Local Responses, by Choi Byung Wook. In Pacific Review (2005). Eclipsed Entrepots of the Western Pacific, edited by John E. Wills. In Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History, 29:1 (2005). Strange Events in the Kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos (1635-1644), translated by Carool Kersten. In Itinerario, 28:2 (2004). Like Froth Floating on the Sea by Robert J. Antony. In Journal of Asian Studies (May 2004). Viet Nam Exposé, ed. Gisele Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux. In Itinerario, Vol. 27:3/4 (2004). Southeast Asia: A Concise History by Mary Somers Heidhues (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000). In The Historian, Spring 2003. Overturned Chariot: The Autobiography of Phan Boi Chau, trans. & introductin by Vinh Sinh (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). In Journal of Asian Studies, February 2003. Courses: Vietnam to 1858 (Hist XXX). Vietnam since 1858 (Hist XXX). War in Vietnam (Hist 175). Remembering War in Vietnam (Hist 190/92). Southeast Asia, undergraduate lecture series (precolonial, colonial, postcolonial). To be launched 2007-08. The South China Sea in World History (Hist 190/92). Silk Roads into World History (Problems in History: Asia, Hist 70A). Reading Vietnamese and Vietnam War Histories (Hist 202). Hydrographic Approaches to World History (Hist 202/03). Other Activities: Editorial Board, Journal of Vietnam Studies (UC Press).