This talk examines the western-language historiography of the Vietnam War, including the shifting political dynamics of the field and the evolution over time of contrasting schools of interpretation. Special attention will be paid to the role of area studies scholarship and Vietnamese language competency in the development of the field.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Born in Bangkok and trained at Cornell, Peter Zinoman is currently Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 and Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung. He is also the co-translator and editor of Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Trong Phung. In 2006, Zinoman founded the Journal of Vietnamese Studies at the University of California Press and he currently serves as the journal’s co-editor-in-chief. Zinoman is the winner of the Harry Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies from the Association for Asian Studies, the John King Fairbanks Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association, and the Vietnamese Studies Prize from the Phan Chau Trinh Cultural Foundation. He is currently writing a book about northern Vietnamese anti-Stalinism during the 1950s.
Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, she is currently working on a project on the history of China's ocean shipping during the Cold War. Qingfei is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degrees and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at the Virginia Military Institute.