FASS Staff Profile

DR GERARD SASGES

DEPARTMENT OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

Appointment:
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Office:
AS8/06-26
Email:
gerard.sasges@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
6516 5181
Fax:
Homepage:
https://nus.academia.edu/GerardSasges
Tabs

Brief Introduction

I’m an historian of technology, development, and the environment, with a focus on Vietnam from 1900 to the present. My research uses non-Western histories of technology to reshape our understanding of development under capitalist and socialist regimes and its relationship to the environment and to lived experience. 


Teaching Areas

Modules I teach include HS2905 Cheeseburger in Paradise, SE3226 Hard at Work, and SE4225 The Cold War in Southeast Asia. 


Graduate Supervision

I’m interested in supervising students who want to explore connections among technology, development, and the environment in Southeast Asia. These days, I’m focused on the period after 1945 and the ways people in the region deployed technology to construct new post-colonial worlds in the context of the global Cold War.


Current Research

My new research traces flows of water and electricity to write an energy-centred account of Vietnam’s economic, social, political, and environmental transformation since 1945.


Research Interests

Modern Vietnam, Technology, Development, Environment, Colonialism, Capitalism, Socialism


Publications

BOOKS/MONOGRAPHS AUTHORED

  • Độc quyền Rượu và Chế độ Thuộc địa Pháp ở Đông Dương. Ho Chi Minh City: Nhà xuất bản Tổng hợp TP.HCM, 2022.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

  • “Mold’s dominion: science, empire, and capitalism in a globalizing world.” American Historical Review 126, no. 1: 82-108.
  • “Acceleration in a time of war: technology, nation, and ecology in the South China Sea, 1956-1966.” Special issue on environmental history, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol 51, No. 4 (2020).
  • “Symbolizing (in)dependence: Vietnam, Intercosmos, and the strategic ambiguity of late socialist ritual.” Russian Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2019).
  • “Drunken poets and new women: consuming tradition and modernity in colonial Vietnam.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 48(1) (2017): 6–30.
  • "Absent Maps, Marine Science, and the Reimagination of the South China Sea, 1922–1939." Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 75, No. 1 (2016): 1–24.
  • “Scaling the Commanding Heights: The colonial conglomerates and the changing political economy of French Indochina.” Modern Asian Studies 49 (2015), pp. 1485-1525.
  • “Competing legacies: rupture and continuity in Vietnamese political economy” (with Scott Cheshier). South East Asia Research, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2012), pp. 5-33.
  • “Beast of (a) burden: State, Enterprise, and the Alcohol Monopoly in Colonial Vietnam,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 43, Issue 1 (2012), pp. 133-157.
  • “Indigenous representation is hostile to all monopolies”: Pham Quynh and the End of the Alcohol Monopoly in Colonial Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, Issue 1 (2010): 1-36.

EDITORIAL WORK ON BOOKS

  • Hard at work: Life in Singapore (with Ng Shi Wen). Singapore: NUS Press, 2019.
  • Việt Nam ngày nay - Chuyện Mưu Sinh. Ho Chi Minh City: Thai Ha Press, 2014.
  • It’s a living: stories of work from Vietnam. Singapore: NUS Press, 2013.

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

  • “Đổi mới or đổi lại? Contemporary Vietnam in historical perspective.” In the Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam, Jonathan London, ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2021
  • “L’Autorité de la machine: Albert Calmette et l’histoire du monopole d’alcool,” in Autorités de l'Indochine coloniale. Jean-Jacques Tatin-Gourier. ed. Editions le Manuscrit: Paris, 2015.
  • “State, Enterprise, and the Alcohol Monopoly in Colonial Vietnam,” in The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, (Volume I); Social Organisation, Owen White, ed., London: Ashgate, 2013.

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Claire E. Edington, Beyond The Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam.Pacific Affairs 94, no. 3: 627-628.
  • Michitake Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975, In Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2019).
  • Ben Kiernan's Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, Christopher Goscha's Vietnam: A New History, and Keith Taylor's A History of the Vietnamese: a review article. H-France Review Vol. 17 (2017), No. 194.
  • Keith Taylor, ed. Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam. In Southeast Asian Studies Vol.5, No.1 (April 2016), pp. 163-166.
  • Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Passion, Betrayal and Revolution in Colonial Vietnam: The Memoirs of Bao Luong. In South East Asia Research, Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 169-172.
  • Phan Chau Trinh and his Political Writings, trans. Vinh Sinh. In South East Asia Research, Vol. 18, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 116-119.
  • Susan Bayly, Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age: Vietnam, India & Beyond. In The International Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 7, issue 01 (January 2010), pp. 99-101.

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