The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (book talk)
Dr. Kathryn Dyt will present and discuss her book, The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (University of Hawai‘i Press 2025), exploring its implications for our understandings of Nguyễn Vietnam.
The Nature of Kingship examines how power and court hierarchies in nineteenth-century Vietnam were deeply intertwined with the natural world. It offers important insights into Vietnamese kingship by delving into the intricate workings of the Nguyễn court and its interactions with the natural world. Weaving together a rich array of sources including official histories, royal poetry, astrological manuals, geography texts, and provincial gazetteers, Kathryn Dyt vividly demonstrates how Nguyễn governance and court hierarchies were intertwined with a powerful, agentive, and emotional “weather-world”—a world inhabited by ecological actors such as rain, wind, land, and skies.
Speaker & chair biographies
Dr. Kathryn Dyt is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at SOAS, University of London. She was previously a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Her current project, History from Below: Subterranean Worlds and Power in Vietnam examines geomancy, geology, and underground imaginaries in Vietnamese history. Her book, The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam, is published by University of Hawai‘i Press (2025).
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
*Banner photo by Phạm Linh on Unsplash
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