About

En français : 1) CV HAL, 2) Page institutionnelle. Contact: nga.bellis[at]gmail.com

 

Nga Bellis-Phan is a Legal Historian specialised in French Early modern Private law and Social history.

Areas of interests

– History of private law – contract, securities for debts
– Social & economic history – pawnbroking, poverty, credit & debts
– Early modern legal manuscripts – notarial, judicial and criminal archives
– Digital humanities – characters recognisation for manuscripts, digital edition

Experience

After graduating in Private Law from University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas Law School with a full scholarship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she received several research fundings to pursue as a PhD candidate at the Institute of Legal History – University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas. The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt, Germany) welcomed her as a visiting researcher in Spring 2017. Since 2016, Nga has been consistently presenting her research papers in international conferences or seminars organised at different European and North American universities.

She has been working since 2014 as a full-time teaching assistant in Legal History at University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas (2014-2016), University Paris-Nanterre (2017-2019) and University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2021-2022) where she teaches French Legal History, Roman Law, Ancient Greece and Rome’s public institutions to undergraduate students in Law & Political Sciences.

Besides her personal research projects, Nga has 7 years of experience in the field of Digital Humanities and is committed the promotion of open-access in social sciences research. From 2015 to 2019, she was working with MarineLives, a London-based historical research project on 17th century manuscripts of the English High Court of Admiralty, using Digital Humanities tools. In 2018, she became a trustee of Chronoscopic Education, a British nonprofit organisation which promotes Digital Humanities research projects. Since January 2022, Nga joined the editorial board of the European open-access scientific Journal for Digital Legal History, a new European peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal. This year, she will also be closely working with the French national repository for scientific research HAL to promote open-access.

Research

Her doctoral project, The theoretical and practical Legal History of Pawnbroking, from the 16th century to the 1804 French Civil Code, received full funding from the University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas (France), the University Paris-Nanterre (France) and a research scholarship from the Max Planck Institute in Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt, Germany). Her thesis research looks into credit networks and material culture in different social classes of Early Modern France, but also more broadly on the progressive implementation of State regulations to ensure legal security for both creditors and debtors and to protect the most precarious against fatalities of usury.

Her last publications explore the different aspects of securities for debts in early modern France, with an article on legal security at times of troubles (Nomos, 2019), and a chapter on Parisian landlords and tenants’ relationship regarding rent arrears (Palgrave, 2020) [download].

Her ongoing research goes deeper into these topics, with a forthcoming article on the influence of social reputation on the legal evidence of verbal obligations (due date by May 2022 for a French edited volume), and another one on criminal proceedings around the murder of a Parisian female pawnbroker (to be submitted in 2022 to a French/British peer-reviewed journal).