Gerard Sasges

After living in Vietnam for more than ten years and completing a Ph.D. at Berkeley under Peter Zinoman, I joined the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies in 2012. My work uses technology as a means to explore processes of historical change. Basically, I try to follow a technology in whatever direction it takes me: economic, political, cultural, spatial, environmental, and more.

My book Imperial intoxication uses the introduction of new technologies for producing alcohol to explore how colonial rule was elaborated and experienced. Along the way, it sheds new light on topics like colonial economic development, interactions among Vietnamese, French, and Sino-Vietnamese, the operation of the colonial state in space, and political change. My current work uses marine science and fisheries technologies to explore processes of decolonization, nation-building, economic development, and environmental change in the late colonial and Cold War periods.

Alongside all of this, I have an abiding interest in documenting how ordinary Southeast Asians make their ways and live their lives in a period of rapid change. Since 2010 my students and I have been interviewing people about their jobs, first in Vietnam and now in Singapore. One result has been our book, published in English as It's a Living: Life and Work in Vietnam Today, and in Vietnamese as Việt Nam ngày nay - Chuyện mưu sinh. Another is the forthcoming Hard at Work: Life and Labor in Singapore, slated for publication in 2018.