Vatthana Pholsena

Assoc Prof Vatthana Pholsena is Head of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research interrogates the legacies of the Cold War and Vietnam War in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, with particular attention to borderlands, ethnicity and memory practices. She previously held a decade-long research fellowship at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and was a post-doctoral fellow at NUS Asia Research Institute.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy, Humanities & Social Sciences – University of Hull, United Kingdom
• Graduate studies – Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po), Grenoble, France

Research Focus

Vatthana Pholsena’s scholarship centres on war, memory and state formation in mainland Southeast Asia. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Lao-Vietnamese and Lao-Thai borderlands, examining how violent pasts are remembered, silenced or re-interpreted across generations. Her work uses oral history, ethnography and archival research to trace how Cold War conflicts shaped ethnic relations, citizenship and territoriality. Current projects extend this inquiry to digital memory cultures and the reconstitution of multi-ethnic Cold War histories along the Mekong.

Publication Trends

Across more than forty refereed articles and book chapters (2013-2025), her output clusters around three inter-related themes: (1) massacres, trauma and mnemonic practices; (2) revolutionary mobilisation and state-making in upland Laos; and (3) border infrastructures and memory corridors. Recent pieces in Memory Studies and Critical Asian Studies highlight forgotten colonial massacres and their lingering social traces, while earlier work analysed Route 9 and the Tonkin–Yunnan railway as contested colonial-modern artefacts.

Scientific Awards & Recognition

• Principal investigator on multiple CNRS and NUS collaborative grants (details not enumerated in source)
• Invited keynote speaker at international Cold War and Southeast Asian Studies conferences
• ORCID: 0000-0001-5833-7691

Teaching & Mentoring

She convenes courses on wars and revolutions in Southeast Asia, ethnic studies, and the histories and societies of mainland Southeast Asia. While specific advisees are not listed, her role as department Head implies active graduate supervision within NUS Southeast Asian Studies.

Laboratories & Teams

Assoc Prof Pholsena directs the Southeast Asian Studies Collaboration Network at NUS, fostering interdisciplinary research on regional histories and contemporary transformations.