K. W. Taylor is Professor of Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies

Keith Weller Taylor

Professor

Website(s)

• Southeast Asia Program
• East Asia Program

Overview

K. W. Taylor is Professor of Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has published several books and many articles about Vietnamese history and literature, most recently A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has pioneered the teaching in North America of literary Vietnamese in the character script based on literary Chinese called chữ Nôm. He has studied and published about the theory and method of translation from literary Chinese to literary Vietnamese.  After serving with the US Army in Vietnam, he obtained his Ph.D. in 1976 at the University of Michigan. He subsequently taught in Japan and Singapore for several years before returning to the US in 1987. After teaching for two years at Hope College, he took a position at Cornell University in 1989. He has visited Vietnam for research and scholarly exchange many times and lived continuously in Vietnam for two years in the early 1990s while studying and teaching. He has seriously researched all periods of the Vietnamese past and has developed a particular interest in Vietnamese poetry and how it has changed from generation to generation.

Departments/Programs

• Asian Studies

Graduate Fields

• Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture
• Asian Studies
• History

Research

• Vietnamese History
• Translation
• Han-Nom Poetry

Courses

Fall 2019

• ASIAN 3312 : What was the Vietnam War?
• ASIAN 4401 : Asian Studies Honors Course
• ASIAN 4402 : Asian Studies Honors: Senior Essay
• ASIAN 4403 : Supervised Reading
• ASIAN 6671 : Seminar in Asian Literature and History
• ASIAN 7703 : Directed Research

Spring 2020

• ASIAN 1116 : FWS: The Huns
• ASIAN 3319 : Small Countries in a Big World
• ASIAN 4401 : Asian Studies Honors Course
• ASIAN 4402 : Asian Studies Honors: Senior Essay
• ASIAN 4404 : Supervised Reading
• ASIAN 7704 : Directed Research

Publications

Selected Publications

• A History of the Vietnamese  (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• "What lies behind the earliest story of Buddhism in ancient Vietnam?" Journal of Asian Studies, 77, 1 (February 2018): 107-122.
• "Nguyễn Công Trứ at the Court of Minh Mạng," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 42, 2 (June 2016): 256-281.
• "Literacy in Early Seventeenth-Century Northern Vietnam," in Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall, eds. New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing Explorations (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 183-198.
• "Sino-Vietnamese Translation from Classical to Vernacular," in Eva Hung & Judy Wakabayashi, eds., Asian Translation Traditions (London: St. Jerome, 2005), pp. 169-194.
• "Vietnamese Confucian Narratives," in Benjamin A. Elman, John B. Duncan, and Herman Ooms, eds., Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2002), pp. 337-369.
• "Surface Orientations in Vietnam: beyond Historis of Nation and Region," Journal of Asian Studies 57, 4 (November 1998):949-978.
• "Locating and translating boundaries in Nguyen Huy Thiep's short stories," Vietnam Review 1 (autumn-winter 1996):439-465.
• "Perceptions of encounter in Shui ching chu 37," Asia Journal (Seoul National University) 2, 1 (June 1996):29-54.
• "Voices within and without: tales from stone and paper about Do Anh Vu," K. W. Taylor and J. K. Whitmore, eds., Essays into Vietnamese Pasts  (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Publications, 1995), pp. 59-80.
• More items are accessible at https://cornell.academia.edu/KeithWTaylor