George Edson Dutton

I am a Professor at UCLA in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, where I teach courses on Vietnamese history and aspects of Southeast Asian societies and cultures. I am also Director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies. My research covers numerous elements of Vietnamese history between the middle of the eighteenth century and the 1930. I have written about topics ranging from poetry to military technology to newspaper culture. I am particularly interested in topics of society and culture, notably questions of modernization, changing language, and religious practices. I have recently completed a biography of Philiphe Binh, an 18th-century Vietnamese priest who travelled to Lisbon on behalf of his fellow Catholics in 1796. Father Binh spent the rest of his life in Lisbon, where he died in 1833. This book is currently in production with the University of California Press and will likely be released in the Spring of 2017.

While I write books on Vietnamese history, I primarily read mystery novels in my spare time. I am currently reading my way through the list of Edgar Award-winning first novels, and am slowly collecting a complete set of the first editions of those novels. I hope eventually to take a break from academic writing to pen my own mystery.