Keith Weller Taylor

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Keith Weller Taylor (* 1946 ) is an American historian and Southeast Asian scholar with a focus on Vietnam Studies . He is Professor of Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies at Cornell University .

Life

Taylor is from rural Michigan . He attended to 1964 High School in McBain and then the Hope College in Holland, Michigan . In May 1968 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from George Washington University in Washington, DC

A few weeks later he was drafted into military service in Vietnam after the recruitment rate had increased significantly as a result of the Tet offensive . He decided against the possibility of avoiding the war effort by emigrating to Canada and instead volunteered for the Army intelligence service . During the two-year training, he also learned the Vietnamese language, among other things . In 1970 he was finally sent to South Vietnam , where the demoralized US troops were already preparing to withdraw. In 1971 he was withdrawn for health reasons and discharged from the army.

He now continued his history studies at the University of Michigan . Since his interest in the country in which he had fought had been aroused and he already had the necessary language skills, he decided to specialize in the history of Vietnam . After completing his doctorate on the Chinese period of Vietnamese history in 1976, he first went to Japan before receiving a position as a lecturer at the National University of Singapore in 1981 .

In 1987 he finally returned to Hope College as Associate Professor of History. Two years later he moved to the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University in New York State . He lived in Vietnam for some time in the early 1990s. Since 1999 he has been a full professor and holder of the chair in Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies at Cornell University.

Research priorities

Unlike most Western Vietnam historians, who deal primarily with the 20th century and, in particular, with the US intervention, Taylor's research focuses primarily on pre-colonial Vietnamese history before the 20th century. He is now considered one of the leading international experts in this field.

His two most important subject areas are on the one hand the early Vietnamese history from the traditionally handed down myths of origin to the approximately thousand-year Chinese rule to the emergence of the Vietnamese state in the 10th century. On the other hand, he deals in depth with the country's classical literature and education, for example with the development of Vietnamese poetry and the history of the civil service examinations. He is regarded as a specialist in Chữ Nôm - the classic Vietnamese script written with Chinese characters - and a pioneer in its teaching in North America.

Although Taylor has positioned himself as a fundamental supporter of the Vietnam War and a sympathizer of South Vietnam - which has also brought him to be reproached for revisionism among colleagues - and his works contradict official state historiography, his research achievements are still recognized in Vietnam today. In 2015 he received the Phan Châu Trinh Cultural Foundation Prize for Vietnamese Studies in Ho Chi Minh City .

Taylor is the author of two books: The Birth of Vietnam (University of California Press, Berkeley 1983) and A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has also appeared as editor, co-author, translator and reviewer of numerous other works.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Trove - National Library of Australia : Taylor, Keith Weller (1946-) (accessed July 2018)
  2. ^ A b K. W. Taylor: How I Began to Teach About the Vietnam War . In: Viet Nam: Beyond the Frame , Volume XLIII, Issue 4, Fall 2004 ( available online at Michigan Quarterly Review, University of Michigan )
  3. ↑ cornell.academia.edu: KEITH WELLER TAYLOR - Curriculum Vitae (accessed July 2018)
  4. ↑ Hans Hägerdal: Review: KW Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese , April 17, 2017
  5. ↑ asianstudies.cornell.edu: Keith Weller Taylor (accessed July 2018)
  6. ^ KW Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese. Reviewed by Norman G. Owen .
  7. ↑ Ông KEITH WELLER TAYLOR: DIỄN TỪ NHẬN GIẢI VIỆT NAM HỌC (accessed July 2018)
personal data
SURNAME Taylor, Keith Weller
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian with a focus on Vietnam
DATE OF BIRTH 1946