tuannyriver

It’s the “small book” in comparison to the “big book” about Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. The more research I’ve done, the more I believe that in order to understand the history of Vietnamese Catholics in the postwar diaspora, it is necessary to understand the history of the Catholic Church in South Vietnam before 1975.

Here are my publications so far on these subjects; click on the titles to read or download them.

The Catholic experience in South Vietnam

• “Postcolonial Catholicism in South Vietnam, 1954-1975,” in A History of Vietnamese Christianity, edited by Anh Tran and Tuan Hoang (Leiden: Brill, 2026), 372-394.
• “Conciliar, Postconciliar, and Postcolonial: Vatican II, Paul VI, and the Church in South Vietnam,” in The Legacy and Limit of Vatican II in an Age of Crisis, edited by Catherine E. Clifford et al. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2025), 201-218.
• “Pray the Rosary and Do Apostolic Work: The Catholic Associational Culture in South Vietnam and the Diaspora,” in Republican Vietnam 1963–1975: War, Society, Diaspora, edited by Trinh Luu and Tuong Vu (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), 189–202.
• “‘Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart Will Prevail’: Vietnamese Marianism and Anticommunism, 1940-1975,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, vol. 17, nos. 2-3 (2022): 126-154.

The Catholic experience in the diaspora

• “Ultramontanism, Nationalism, and the Fall of Saigon: Historicizing the Vietnamese American Catholic Experience,” American Catholic Studies, vol. 130, no. 1 (2019): 1–36.
• “The Resettlement of Vietnamese Refugee Religious, Priests, and Seminarians in the United States, 1975–1977,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 37, no. 3 (2019): 99–122.
• “Queen of Vietnam, Port Arthur: The Curious Origin of the First Vietnamese Catholic Parish in the United States,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 44, no. 4 (2026): FORTHCOMING.