Trinity’s Dieu Ly Hoang Named One of Berlin’s ‘100 Faces of Science’

Trinity College DPhil student Dieu Ly Hoang has been selected as one of the 100 Köpfe der Berliner Wissenschaft — “100 Faces of Berlin Science” — an annual feature highlighting researchers who are shaping the intellectual life of Berlin and beyond.

The profile, published by the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, places Hoang among a group of researchers exploring what community means and how history, philosophy and culture can help us better understand both the world and one another. For Hoang, those questions are closely connected to her own history.

Born in Vietnam, she grew up first in Hanoi and later in Nauen, a town in Brandenburg outside Berlin. Her path eventually took her through Berlin's universities and, in 2026, to Trinity College and the University of Oxford, where she is undertaking a DPhil in History of Art. Her research takes her back to Vietnam, though much further into its past.

Hoang studies the cultural heritage of the Cham, whose civilisation flourished for centuries in parts of what is now central and southern Vietnam. Cham temples, sculptures and other objects survive today both in Vietnam and in museum collections around the world. Their dispersal raises questions that sit at the heart of Hoang's research: who removed and classified these objects, under what circumstances, and what happens to our understanding of a culture when its material heritage is fragmented?

Her DPhil, Shattered Legacies: Colonial Vietnam and the Making of Fragmented Heritage: The Champa Case (c. 1898–1956), examines those questions through the intertwined histories of French colonialism, archaeology, museums and Vietnamese nation-building. Central to the project is a change of perspective. Conventional provenance research often begins with an object in a museum collection and reconstructs how it arrived there. Hoang instead seeks to begin at the other end of that journey: with the places from which objects disappeared. By returning to archaeological sites and examining archives, excavation histories and gaps in the surviving record, she aims to reconstruct the processes through which Cham cultural heritage was excavated, removed, classified and dispersed.

Hoang describes this history in terms of a “double dispossession”. Cham heritage was affected first by the structures and practices of French colonial archaeology, but its meaning was also reshaped through subsequent processes of Vietnamese territorialisation and nation-building. Her work therefore asks not only what colonial powers did with cultural objects, but how competing ideas of heritage and national identity can determine who is able to claim the past.