Bruce Mcfarland Lockhart

My teaching and my research focus on the countries of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos–being the three places I lived in before moving to Singapore. I’ve been especially interested in the topic of kings and monarchy, but I am now spending more and more time thinking about how these countries perceive and write their own history as well. I have published a book on the last Vietnamese ruler: The End of The Vietnamese Monarchy (Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 1993) and I have completed a manuscript on constitutional monarchy in Thailand. My big long-term project is to write a textbook history of Vietnam which will enable readers (like NUS students, for example) to learn as much as they want about my favorite country without falling asleep over the pages. One of my approaches to teaching is to emphasize the “story” in “history”, and I try to include as many good historical anecdotes as possible in my lectures and my writing. As for my life in Singapore, it is basically focused on my students, my books, my church, and my cats.