Tran Khai Hoai, PhD

Trần Khải Hoài joined VinUniversity in 2022 as a senior lecturer of Vietnamese History and Culture. Hoài studied borderless, transregional approaches to the history and culture of Vietnam as a place with peoples situated between Sinitic East Asian civilizations and the maritime worlds of Southeast Asia at Cornell University, where he completed both his PhD (20220 and MA degrees (2006) in Vietnamese literature, religion, and culture. Before coming to VinUniversity, Hoài served as an associate lecturer at Cornell and taught courses ranging from Chinese and Southeast Asian history to Martial Arts Studies and Traditions of Chinese Thought.

Hoài’s interest in Vietnam extends beyond the university setting. He spent close to a decade pursuing cultural journalism, editing and translation, and non-profit efforts to preserve Vietnam’s cultural heritage. He was an editor and translator for the cultural e-journal Vietnam Heritage as well as Thế Giới Publishers, with whom he worked to produce commemorative publications on the occasion of the one-thousand-year anniversary of Thăng Long–Hà Nội, 1010–2010. He later served as the curator of the NGO and non-profit Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation’s digital collection of Vietnamese Sinographic texts held at Vietnam National Library and two Buddhist pagodas in northern Vietnam. In addition, Hoài has dedicated himself to the perpetuation of Vietnamese embodied culture. From 2007 to 2016, he taught as a grassroots “rooftop” instructor of Vietnamese traditional martial arts (võ cổ truyền) right in the heart of central Hanoi and has continued to promote Vietnamese martial arts both in Vietnam and abroad.

Hoài’s recent and ongoing work ranges across multidisciplinary frontiers in cultural history, ecological humanities, and cultural heritage research. His cultural history projects include tracing the transmission of Taijiquan (T’ai Chi Ch’uen) to Vietnam during the mid-twentieth century and the history of the theatrical play and epic Sino-Vietnamese poem Quan Âm Thị Kính—a unique Vietnamese tale that takes place, remarkably, in Korea. For ecological humanities, he writes about the potential significance of Buddhist apocalyptic thought vis-à-vis existential climate crises, especially in the Mekong Delta. In addition, as a designated UNESCO Chair “cultural heritage research scientist,” Hoài studies the impact of changes in environment and climate on riverine, coastal, and maritime cultures in southern Vietnam such as worship of the Whale God of the Southern Seas and their consequences for ecological and spiritual tourism in the Mekong Delta.