Professor Hieu Phung (PhD, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is a Sinologist turned environmental historian specializing in the history of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Her research examines how local culture and statecraft shaped preindustrial environments, with particular attention to water, climate, and environmental change during the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age (c. 800/950–1850). She also approaches environmental history through the study of space, maps, and texts, illuminating the production of premodern geographic knowledge.
Her forthcoming book, The Good Drought: Natural Anomalies, Fragmented Chronicles, and Dai Viet’s Ascent during the Little Ice Age, which critically juxtaposes fragmented dynastic chronicles with paleoclimate reconstructions, argues that state responses to natural anomalies were not the sole drivers of political consolidation, but they visibly reinforced Dai Viet’s endurance through proactive agricultural policies and a political culture that made the state accountable for disaster relief. Professor Phung teaches courses on Asian environmental issues, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and Global Asia, bridging the humanities and environmental sciences.
Selected Publications
- “River, Climate, and Water Technologies in Early Southeast Asia,” New Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, volume 1,edited by Miriam T. Stark (forthcoming, 2026/7).
- “Before the River Network: The Visualization of the Red River System in Vietnam, 1300-1700,” Water and Culture in Eurasian History, volume 2, edited by Nicholas Breyfogle and Philip Brown, University of Pittsburgh Press (under contract, 2026).
- “Meteorology in Vietnam, Pre 1800,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 20 June 2022
- “Case Study: The Red River Dikes in Northern Vietnam.” The Cultural Heritages of Water in the Tropical and Sub-tropical Eastern and Southern Eastern Asia. A Thematic Study by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites, an advisory body to UNESCO for World Heritage), edited by Michel Cotte, Nupur Prothi, and Jean-François Toulze, 2022.
- "Naming the Red River—Becoming a Vietnamese River." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (2020): 518-537.