Position: Associate Professor
Field: Cultural, Political, Religious
Region: Southeast Asia
Office: 211 Old Horticulture
Office Hours: Friday 9:30-11:30
Email: ckeith@msu.edu
Phone: (517) 884-4916
Education
Ph.D., Yale University, 2008
A.B., Cornell University, 1999
Charles Keith is an historian of modern Vietnam. He is the author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2012). Catholic Vietnam received the 2015 Harry J. Benda Book Prize (Association for Asian Studies), the 2013 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize (French Colonial Historical Society), and the 2013 John Gilmary Shea Book Prize (American Catholic Historical Association). It has been translated into Vietnamese.
Professor Keith’s new book, Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France (forthcoming, University of California Press, 2024), explores the sojourns of Indochinese colonial subjects in France and the influence of these circulations on the making of colonial and postcolonial societies in mainland Southeast Asia.
Professor Keith is co-Principal Investigator of the MSU Vietnam Group Archive, an NEH-funded project to digitize and disseminate materials generated by Michigan State’s technical assistance programs in South Vietnam from 1955-1962. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies from 2015-2022 (2015-18 as book review editor, 2018-2022 as co-editor-in-chief).