Liam Kelley

As an Example he presented the book "Vạn Quốc Công Pháp" (萬國公法), a Chinese translation of The Elements of International Law, first published in 1836 by American lawyer Henry Wheaton, a book noted by many researchers to have made a profound contribution to the ideological transformation of the ruling elites in Qing China and Japan.

It is noted that the very slow adoption of the ideas from this work in the Nguyễn dynasty showed how slow its elites adopted Western ideas and despite learning about Western ideas they were slow to adopt them or adapt to them.

Liam Christopher Kelley (born 28 December 1966), or Lê Minh Khải (Traditional Chinese: 黎明凱), is an American Vietnamologist and a professor of Southeast Asian history and lecturer at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, he formerly taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu.

His studies mainly focus on all periods in Vietnamese history, but he also teaches broadly on Southeast Asian, Asian and World History.

Kelley also has a research interest in the digital humanities where he analyses and discusses the ways in which the Digital Revolution is transforming how scholars can produce and disseminate their ideas online and uses new digital media himself, such as a blog, for academic purposes.

Kelley is known for challenging many established beliefs in the field of Vietnamese history which he claims go unchallenged because of the nationalist narrative that affects the historiography of Vietnam.

Further, he is known for his studies of Vietnamese "envoy poetry".

Many of his critics describe his works as being Sinocentric and overemphasising the importance of Chinese culture and influence in Vietnamese history.

Liam Kelley was born on 28 December 1966.

He grew up in the state of Vermont.

During his years in Taiwan he had taken a number of trips to Thailand in the late 1980s and early 1990s which he fancied, his time in Taiwan and Thailand made him fascinated with both Classical Chinese and Southeast Asia so he decided to focus his studies on Vietnam because in his words "{G}iven that Vietnamese used to write in classical Chinese, and given the fact that I had never been to mainland China, and given the fact that a couple of trips to Thailand had peaked my interest in Southeast Asia, I decided to study more about it, and particularly about Vietnam."

While in Taiwan someone gave him the Chinese name Li Ming Kai (黎明凱), a name inspired by the Hong Kong celebrity Leon Lai Ming (黎明), plus the name was chosen because its three characters are written in 36 strokes which makes it an auspicious name.

The Vietnamese language reading of this name, Lê Minh Khải, is sometimes written as Lê Minh Khai without the dấu hỏi.

In 1989, he received his B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States.

After this he decided to go to Taiwan to teach English "just for one year" but would spend four years on the island, while there he studied Mandarin Chinese at the same time that he was teaching English.

During the late 1990s, Kelley studied the Vietnamese language for four years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa while during those summers he would go to Hanoi and learn more of the language and culture.

His research and teaching focus on mainland Southeast Asian history and premodern Vietnamese history.

Kelley was a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

He is currently co-editor in chief of the journal China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies.

He has published a book on Vietnamese envoy poetry (known in Vietnamese as thơ đi sứ), co-edited a book on the southern borders of China, published articles and book chapters on the invention of traditions in "medieval Vietnam" (Việt Nam cổ trung đại), and the emergence of Vietnamese nationalism and spirit writing (giáng bút) in early twentieth century Vietnam under French domination.

Kelley has also completed English language translations of several old Vietnamese texts such as the outer annals (ngoại kỷ) of the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư and the Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục.

After returning to the United States he received his M.A. in 1996 and then his Ph.D. in 2001 both in Chinese history from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he would later teach himself.

In his first book Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship published in 2005 Kelley examines much of the early scholarship concerning the Sino-Vietnamese relationship and noted that this early historical scholarship presented Vietnam as a "little China" (小中華, Tiểu Trung Hoa), while subsequent research made after World War II focused more on critiquing this theory.

Kelley claimed that this resulted in an unwavering belief in what he calls the "not Chinese" theory of the history of Vietnam.

Writing that many past historians in the field have often misinterpreted many historical Vietnamese documents and writings as a "literature of resistance to domination", instead Kelley presents that a large number of these historical writings did not concern Chinese domination over the country but internal problems and hostilities within Vietnam.

According to Kelley in some instances the Vietnamese actually welcomed the Imperial Chinese military to take sides in Vietnam's own internal struggles, which he supports by pointing to specific historical Vietnamese texts and their authors who embraced the Chinese.

American historian Keith Taylor claimed that "Liam Kelley has opened a new topic with his study of poetry written in classical Chinese by Vietnamese envoys to the Ming and Qing courts during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries," adding that the book points out the "East Asian" connection of the educated Vietnamese of the time, which is often suppressed by Vietnamese nationalist historiography.

In 2006 Kelley's works on "envoy poetry" were translated by Overseas Vietnamese Lê Quỳnh into the Vietnamese language.

Together with Tạ Chí Đại Trường he criticised the authenticity of the Hùng kings claiming that they were later invented and that their supposed historicity had no basis in reality.

Tạ Chí Đại Trường claimed that the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was unwilling to challenge the current narrative of the Hùng kings because of the adulation that the country had received in light of the Vietnam War by foreigners that admired the Communists' struggle that caused it to promote the previously vague myth of the Hùng kings to become a national legend taught unquestionably to the Vietnamese people as it's a powerful origin myth, making any critical discussion about the Hồng Bàng dynasty tense.

Tạ Chí Đại Trường praised Kelley for challenging the myth and agrees with his general arguments, but noted that he still had some criticism towards a small number of points in his work on the subject.

Kelley operates a blog under his Vietnamese pseudonym, "Lê Minh Khải".

His blog is subtitled "Always Rethinking the Southeast Asian Past."

Together with Professor Phan Lê Hà in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education (SHBIE), Professor Kelley organises an annual conference called "Engaging With Vietnam: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue".

The conference itself was established by Phan Lê Hà in 2009, then at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and has been held in Vietnam, Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands.

The conference partners with a different university each year.

During the mid-2010s he was researching the efforts to discover the origins of the Vietnamese people by various people in modern times, from French scholars during the period of French domination to various later Vietnamese scholars that were active in the post-colonial era.

During this time he had been back and forth in Vietnam, attending a number of seminars and publishing many articles largely to prove that the history and traditions of "anti-foreign aggression of the Vietnamese people" (Truyền thống chống ngoại xâm của dân tộc Việt Nam) are only recent pieces of fiction, and were cultural values that the Vietnamese people were proud to have only after establishing contact with the West.

This working method has influenced the concepts and working methods of a number of authors, especially young authors, to change their views on Vietnamese history and how to research it.

In 2018 Kelley wrote on his blog challenging the narratives surrounding the Nguyễn dynasty's Tự Đức Emperor, while typically Tự Đức is presented as being Conservative and that his Conservatism and Confucianism didn't allow him to reform and modernise the country as had happened in contemporary Japan which eventually led to the French being able to overtake and conquer Đại Nam, on his blog Kelley states that he found two instances where the Tự Đức Emperor had ordered the Chinese edition of several classic books on science and industry from the West to be read by the mandarins and soldiers of the country.