Dr. Tam Ngo, 2009-2023

Tam Ngo was a Research Fellow at the Institute. She studied religious change, dialogues between spiritualism and science, and memory politics in post-war late socialist Vietnam and China using anthropological methods and discourse analysis. A podcast about her first book, “The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam” (Seattle, 2016) can be listened here. A review of it can be read here. She is writing her second monograph, provisionally titled “The Unclaimed War: The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War. Memory politics in Vietnam and China”. She received a Senior VIDI grant (2020-2024) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for a research project on the use of spiritual and DNA forensics to find and identify war dead in Vietnam and its implications for the country‘s reconciliation politics. She has recruited one Post-doctoral Fellow and two Ph.D. students for this project. 

Research projects

• Between a rock and a hard place: Sinophobia and religious nationalist sentiments in Vietnam (completed)
• North-South by East-West (with Peter van der Veer) (completed)
• The unclaimed war: the social memory of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War in China and Vietnam (completed)
• Bones of contention: technologies of identification and the politics of reconciliation in Vietnam (completed)
• Spiritual heritage and the question of post-war reconciliation in Vietnam (completed)