Christian C. Lentz

Christian C. Lentz is a human geographer and qualitative social scientist interested broadly in Southeast Asia’s politics, societies, and environments. His research brings classic themes of social inquiry, such as nationalism, state formation, and agrarian political economy, into dialogue with concepts of boundaries, territory, and social difference (e.g., racial and ethnic formations). His forthcoming book, Contested Territory: Dien Bien Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (Yale University Press), focuses on a borderlands region and the processes through which its peoples and places were made Vietnamese, sometimes against their will. An upcoming project brings postcolonial Vietnamese and Indonesian history into comparative historical perspective by examining divergent Cold War trajectories and convergent experiences with mass violence. Another draws on research conducted in Sumba, Indonesia, in 1997 and 2000 to restudy social adaptation to the El Nino Southern Oscillation and its environmental outcomes.