My research and writing has been generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, American Institute for Indonesian Studies, the Association for Asian Studies, and a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award in Vietnam as well as fellowships at the Institute Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC-CH.
Keywords: territory, development, state formation, nationalism, nature-society relations, agrarian studies, Southeast Asia, decolonization
Sample publications:
Lentz, Christian C. 2025. “Where was Dien Bien Phu? Oey Hong Lee’s Eventful Geography of Decolonization in Cold War Asia.” Journal of Historical Geography 89 (Sep): 185-197.
Lentz, Christian C., ed. 2025. “Teaching the History of the Vietnam Wars: A Geographic History of the Vietnam Wars.” American Historical Review 130(1): 279-316.
Lentz, Christian C. “The Archive, the Road, and the Field Between: Towards a Geography of Vietnam’s Black River Region,” in Chasing Traces: History and Ethnography in the Uplands of Socialist Asia, Pierre Petit and Jean Michaud, eds. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2024), pp. 32-51.
Lentz, Christian C. and Scott Kirsch. 2024. “Postcolonial conflict in Southeast Asia: rethinking the shatterbelt with colonial rupture in Asia’s Cold War,” pp. 128-148 in Making Geographies of Peace and Conflict, C. Flint and K. Dempsey, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2024).
Lentz, Christian C. 2017. “Cultivating subjects: Opium and rule in postcolonial Vietnam.” Modern Asian Studies 51 (4): 879-918. 
Lentz, Christian C. 2015. “Encountering everyday perspectives on the American War.” Geopolitics 20(4): 753-756.
Lentz, Christian C. 2014. “The king yields to the village? A micropolitics of statemaking in Northwest Vietnam.” Political Geography 39 (Mar): 1-10.
Lentz, Christian C. 2013. “Mountain Village Head,” pp. 65-7 in
Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity. J. Barker, E. Harms, and J. Lindquist, eds (Honolulu: Univ of Hawaii Press.)
Lentz, Christian C. 2011. “Making the Northwest Vietnamese.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 6(2): 68-105.
*Winner of Vietnam Studies Group graduate studentessay prize, Association of Asian Studies (2011).
*Special issue on “Hidden Histories and Submerged Stories from Northwest Vietnam.” Bradley C. Davis & Christian C. Lentz, eds.
Lentz, Christian C. 2011. “Mobilization and State Formation on a Frontier of Vietnam.” 
Journal of Peasant Studies 38(3): 559-586.
*Winner of Philip Taietz graduate student essay prize,
Development Sociology, Cornell University (2010).