Tara Alberts
is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York (United Kingdom). Her works include Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2013), Intercultural Exchange in Southeast Asia, edited with D.R.M Irving (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and Translating Medicine Across Premodern Worlds, edited with Sietske Fransen and Elaine Leong (Orisis, 2022). Her current project focuses on the circulation of medicines, beliefs, and practices, and the exchange of ideas about health and healing on the trade routes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Southeast Asia.
Thien Bui
is a doctoral candidate in History at the National University of Singapore, focusing on modern Vietnamese history. His research explores the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the public engagement of Vietnamese Catholics in the twentieth century.
Lan T. Chu
is a professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College (California, USA). Her research focuses on the political role of religious institutions, the Catholic Church and global politics, faith diplomacy, religion and international relations theory, inter-religious dialogue, political ideologies (theory and practice), and the political liberalization processes of former and existing communist countries. She is the co-author of Ideology: A Primer for the Exercise of Power or Its Resistance (Routledge, forthcoming), On the Significance of Religion and Climate Change (Routledge, 2025), and co-editor of the special issue “Traditional and Civil Religions: Theory and Political Practice,” Religions (2025). She also has published a number of book chapters as well as journal articles; her work has appeared in Politics and Religion, Democratization, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Islamic Perspective.
Nola Cooke
is a retired historian who researched Vietnamese history from the 15th to 19th centuries at The Australian National University. She has published several articles on Vietnamese Catholicism in the early modern and Nguyễn eras, based largely on archival sources from the Missions Étrangères de Paris.
is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of California Los Angeles (USA), specializing in early modern through early colonial Vietnamese history. His first book was on the Tây Sơn uprising in late eighteenth-century Vietnam. His most recent monograph, A Vietnamese Moses (University of California Press, 2016), is a study of Vietnamese Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as seen through the life and projects of a Vietnamese priest, Father Philiphê Bỉnh.
Fr. Laurent Gatinois, MEP
is a French member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP), currently residing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He holds a master’s degree in engineering (Ecole Centrale Paris) and a doctorate in dogmatic theology from the Gregorian University (Rome). His dissertation, which was completed in 2016, explores the Christology of Saint Bonaventure. His current research focuses on the history of the missions in Vietnam, particularly on the seventeenth and twentieth-century missionaries.
Hoàng Văn Chung
is a researcher at the Institute of Anthropology and Religious Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author of New Religions and State’s Response to Religious Diversification in Contemporary Vietnam: Tensions from the Reinvention of the Sacred (Springer, 2018).
Tuan Hoang
is Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities and Teacher Education, and Professor of Great Books, at Pepperdine University (USA). He teaches in the Great Books and history programs; and researches the histories of Vietnamese Catholics in the Republic of Vietnam and the postwar diaspora.
Charles Keith
is Professor of History at Michigan State University (USA). He is the author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2012) and Subjects and Sojourners: A History of Indochinese in France (University of California Press, 2024).
Vince (Vu) Le
is a faculty member in theological studies at Union University of California (USA), and currently resides in Vietnam. He is the author of Vietnamese Evangelicals and Pentecostalism: The Politics of Divine Intervention (Brill, 2019).
is the Associate Director of the Newman Center at UC San Diego and serves on the formation staff for the Diocese of San Diego’s seminary. A historian of Vietnamese Christianity, he holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from UC Berkeley. His work focuses on the Nguyễn dynasty, investigating the intersection of Catholic identity, indigenous clerical culture, and traditions of martyrdom. Previously, he spent nine years on the faculty of Loyola Marymount University, teaching Asian histories and Christianity in Asia.
Tâm T. T. Ngô
is a social anthropologist and permanent member of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Netherlands. She is the author of The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016).
Nguyễn Mai Kha, SJ
is currently the Prefect of Theological Studies at St Joseph Jesuit Scholasticate in Vietnam. He earned a doctorate in ecclesiastical history (EHD) from Gregorian University in 2023, focusing on the early Vietnamese martyrs of the seventeenth century.
KimSon Nguyen
is a faculty member at Union University of California (USA), teaching and researching on mission and theology. He is the author of Cultural Integration and the Gospel in Vietnamese Mission Theology: A Paradigm Shift (Langham Academic, 2019).
Nguyễn Quang Hưng
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities of Vietnam National University—Hanoi. He has published two books in German concerning Vietnamese Catholicism: Der Katholizismus unter besonderer Berückstigung der Zeit der Nguyen Dynastie (Tectum Verlag, 1998) and Der Katholizismus in Vietnam von 1954 bis 1975 (Logos Verlag, 2004).
Peter C. Phan
holds the Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J. Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University (USA). He has earned three doctorates and received four honorary doctorates. Prof. Phan is the first non-Anglo to be elected President of the Catholic Theological Society of America and of the American Theological Society. In 2020, he received the John Courtney Murray Award, the highest
Anh Q. Tran, SJ
is Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology (USA). He is the author of Gods, Heroes and Ancestors (Oxford, 2018) and co-editor of World Christianities (Orbis Books, 2016) and Christian Perspectives on Interreligious Encounter (Lexington, 2024), as well as many book chapters and articles related to Asian Christianity, interreligious dialogue, and the Jesuit activities in Vietnam.
Claire Thi Liên Tran
is Associate Professor in the History of Southeast Asia at Paris Cité University (France), and a researcher at the Centre for Social Sciences Studies on the African, American and Asian Worlds (CESSMA). Her research focuses on modern Vietnam, particularly the history of Catholicism, state religion relations, and religious mobility from a global perspective.
Dung Trang, LHC
received her Ph.D. from Villanova University in May 2023. A member of the Lovers of the Holy Cross Khiet Tam, Vietnam, her research focuses on Vietnamese Catholicism, Catholic women, and Marian devotion. Her dissertation was on the spirituality of Our Lady of Lavang, a Marian devotion in Vietnam.
Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal
is Professor in Ethnic Studies at San Joaquin Delta Community College (California, USA). Her publications include Race, Gender, and Religion in the Vietnamese Diaspora: The New Chosen People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and numerous articles and book chapters about the Vietnamese diaspora.
Hélène Vu Thanh
is Assistant Professor in Modern History (University of Bretagne-Sud, France). A PhD graduate from Sorbonne University, she specializes in the study of missionaries in and around Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her recent research focuses on the funding of the Asian missions from a local and global perspective. She is the author of Devenir japonais. La mission jésuite au Japon, 1549–1614 (Presses universitaires Paris-Sorbonne, 2016); editor of Les missions religieuses à l’épreuve des empires coloniaux, XVI e–XX e siècles (Hémisphères, 2022); and co-editor with Ines Županov, Trade and Finance in Global Missions, 16th–18th centuries (Brill, 2020).