Welcome!

I am Anh Le — Lê Sỹ Huy Anh in Vietnamese diacritics — an Assistant Professor of History, Asian Studies, and International Studies at Muhlenberg College. Before joining Muhlenberg, I was Assistant Professor of History at St. Norbert College, where I regularly taught introductory and advanced courses on modern East Asia, China, Vietnam, colonial Southeast Asia, global Chinese migration, Asian American history, and comparative colonialism.

Trained as a historian of China and Vietnam, I study the histories of migration, empire, political economy, and inter-Asian networks that connect these two vast (yet still contested) regions. My research centers on three interrelated questions: how Chinese migrant networks shaped urbanization and commercial life; how colonial states governed ethnic and diasporic communities; and how mobile Asian communities reshaped colonial power from within and across imperial boundaries.

I am currently completing a book manuscript, Entangled Histories: Chinese Migration, Inter-Asian Connections, and Empire Building in French Colonial Vietnam. The book examines the migration, settlement, and institutional life of Chinese communities in southern Vietnam, with particular attention to their role in the making of Sài Gòn–Chợ Lớn as one of Southeast Asia’s most important colonial port cities. At once a social and economic history of Chinese migrants and a political history of interethnic relations, the project shows how Chinese diasporic networks were central to the making of colonial urban life, regional capitalism, and French imperial governance in Vietnam.

I received my Ph.D. with distinction in East Asian History from Michigan State University in 2021 and my B.A. with Honors in Economics and Chinese Studies from Wabash College. At Michigan State, I worked under the supervision of Dr. Charles P. Keith, a leading historian of modern Vietnam and French Indochina, and served on the organizing committee of the university’s interdisciplinary Migration Studies Collective. I am also a proud graduate of the Chinese language programs at Middlebury College and Fudan University, experiences that helped shape my path toward the study of China, Vietnam, and the wider Sinophone world.

Throughout my career, I have been the recipient of competitive fellowships from the Eisenhower Institute, The American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation–American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the National Library of Singapore. I have held visiting fellowships at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore and Singapore’s National Library Board. Committed to multi-sited and multilingual archival research, I have conducted research in national libraries and state, municipal, and colonial archives across China, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and France.

Beyond reading, writing, and teaching history, I am an amateur runner and indoor rock-climbing enthusiast. I find solace in hiking trails, a growing record collection, good novels, and the occasional video game. I also enjoy wandering through digital archives in search of unexpected materials — often unrelated to my own research, but very likely to find their way into my teaching.