Dr Kathryn Dyt
Office: Room 3.38, third floor, Faculty of Arts Building
Email and phone: Kathryn.Dyt@warwick.ac.uk, 0247 61 51611, internal extension 5161
Office hours: Term-Time Office Hours:
Thursday, 12–1pm (in person, Room 3.38). Please book your meeting with me using this link (you will need to login through your university account).
Tuesday, 12–1pm (online via MS Teams). Please email in advance to arrange a Teams chat.
I am Assistant Professor in Environmental History at Warwick. I specialise in the history of Vietnam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research addresses how environmental and decolonial histories can recover ways of knowing that have been marginalised by colonial archives and modern disciplinary categories. Drawing on anthropology and phenomenology, I am interested in how people experience their environment and in more-than-human worlds.
My book, The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2025), won the 2026 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize. The book explores the Nguyễn court in relation to the powerful, agentive and emotional “weather-world” in which it was immersed. Drawing on sources in Vietnamese, Chinese and French, I approach kingship from an ecological perspective, asking how royal power was shaped through relationships with the natural world. Ranging across topics such as astronomy, meteorology, divination, rainmaking rituals and imperial poetry, the book reveals how Nguyễn rulers consolidated their authority through displays of superior weather knowledge and reciprocal emotional resonance with the environment.
My current British Academy-funded project, “History from Below: Subterranean Worlds and Power in Vietnam,” explores how subterranean worlds have been understood, harnessed and controlled in Vietnam since the early nineteenth century. Through case studies spanning two centuries, from the Nguyễn dynasty and French colonialism to communist revolution and the present, I ask how looking below the surface challenges historical narratives that treat power as a purely socio-cultural pursuit played out on a fixed terrestrial surface. The project adds new layers to established historical narratives by scrutinising the underground as a site of cultural, economic and supernatural power that Vietnamese dynasties and foreign empires sought to understand, contain and exploit.
Before joining Warwick, I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at SOAS, University of London, and was a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. I completed my PhD at the Australian National University, where my thesis was awarded the 2018 Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) John Legge Prize for Best Thesis on an Asian Studies Topic. I also hold a research Master’s degree in History and a BA (Hons) in History and Japanese from Monash University.
Teaching
In 2026/2027, I am teaching on Historical Research (HI2K9)
Academic Profile:
From 2026: Assistant Professor in Environmental History, University of Warwick
2026–present: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Warwick
2023–2026: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, SOAS University of London
2021–2022: Past & Present Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London
2017: PhD, Australian National University
Publications:
“Crocodiles, Dragons, and Species Fluidity in Vietnam.” In Water Powers: Divine Animals of Riverine and Maritime Asia, edited by Aike Rots, 71-96. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2026).
The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2025). Winner of the 2026 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize.
“Living in an Eggshell: Cosmological Emplacement in Nguyễn Vietnam, 1802-1883” in New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Alison Bashford, Adam Bobbette and Emily Kerr (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2023).
“Emperor Tự Đức’s ‘Bad Weather’: Interpreting Natural Disasters in Vietnam, 1847-1883”, in Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger, ed. by Bankoff, Greg and Joseph Christensen, pp. 169-198 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
“‘Calling for Wind and Rain’ Rituals: Environment, Emotion and Governance in Nguyễn Vietnam, 1802-1883”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2015), 10.2: 1-42.