Keith Weller Taylor (born 1946^[1]) is an American sinologist, historian and writer noted for his expertise on Vietnamese history and Vietnamese literature. He currently is Professor of Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Unlike most Western Vietnam historians, who write primarily about the 20th century and, in particular, about the US intervention, Taylor's research focuses mostly on pre-colonial Vietnamese history before the 20th century. He is now considered one of the pioneer experts in this field. He fought in Vietnam as a soldier in the United States Army, and subsequently has visited Vietnam for research and scholarly exchange many times and lived continuously in Vietnam for two years in the early 1990s while studying and teaching. He has researched all periods of the Vietnamese past and has developed a particular interest in Vietnamese poetry and how it has changed from generation to generation. In 2015 he received the Phan Châu Trinh Cultural Foundation Prize for Vietnamese Studies in Ho Chi Minh City.^[2]

Publications

• The Birth of Vietnam: Sino-Vietnamese Relations to the Tenth Century and the Origins of Vietnamese Nationhood. University of Michigan Press. 1976.
• The Birth of Vietnam. University of California Press. 1983. ISBN 978-0-52007-417-0.
• Essays Into Vietnamese Pasts. Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University. 1995. ISBN 978-0-87727-718-7. (co-author with John K. Whitmore).
• Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam: Christoforo Borri on Cochinchina and Samuel Baron on Tonkin. Cornell University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-87727-771-2. (edited by Taylor and Olga Dror)
• A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge University Press. 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-24435-1.
• Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967–1975). Cornell University Press. 2014. ISBN 978-0-877-27765-1.