Dr. Vy CAO

Cao Vy is a postdoctoral researcher in Digital History and Vietnamese Studies. They are part of the project Impresso – Media Monitoring of the Past II, working under the supervision of Marten Düring.

Trained in both historical methods and computational approaches, Cao Vy
specialises in the analysis of multilingual corpora. Their research engage with
the epistemological and material conditions of knowledge production in colonial
and postcolonial contexts. Their doctoral thesis explored a digital corpus of
thousands of colonial prints and ephemera in French and Vietnamese,
preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. As part of the Impresso
project, Vy’s current research focuses on the media circulation of quinine – a
substance used in the medical field to treat malaria, and also employed in
colonial leisure culture as a key ingredient in tonic waters.

Cao Vy has led training sessions and workshops in databases and digitised
content for students and early-career researchers in both France and Vietnam.
They have also contributed to the MOOC module “Open Science in Area
Studies”, an online course designed for students at Inalco (Paris, France).

Since 2024, Cao Vy has been a core member of DISTAM, a French scientific
consortium that fosters research projects and promotes Digital Studies of Africa,
Asia, and the Middle East. They have actively participated in the consortium’s
activities, such as DISTAM annual summer schools, which aim to raise awareness
of digital tools and resources in the Humanities and Area studies. In 2025, they
received funding from DISTAM to lead a digital residency and experimentation
focused on using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to analyse a
multilingual corpus.

Cao Vy was awarded the Paul LeClerc Grant and a research fellowship from the
Bibliothèque nationale de France (2022-2024). They also received a mobility
grant from the École française d’Extrême-Orient in 2022.

Cao Vy worked as a data engineer and research assistant for DISTAM from 2024
to July 2025. They were also a research fellow at the Bibliothèque nationale de
France from 2022 to 2024, where they conducted a study on Indochinese and
Vietnamese employees at the library in the early 20th century. Their work
aimed to shed light on the human and material conditions involved in the
creation of a colonial collection at the library, and ultimately, of the digitised
corpus now available on Gallica.

Cao Vy successfully defended their PhD in History and Vietnamese Literature in
June 2025 at Aix-Marseille University. They hold multiple Master’s degrees in
the Humanities and Social Sciences, including a Master’s in Religions and Society
from the École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL (2019), a Master’s in
Anthropology and Political Philosophy from Université Paris Cité (2019), and a
Master’s in International Affairs from Sciences Po Rennes. In 2025, they also
completed the online Data Science bootcamp at CodeOp, an international tech
school based in Barcelona.