Abstract:

Conventional narratives of Vietnamese history depict a culture steeped in a millennia-old struggle against foreign aggression. This is understandable given Vietnam’s recent encounters with France, the United States, and China. But a closer examination of this history reveals insights, both complex and illuminating, into the way Vietnamese have long defined leadership, learning, and success. Indeed, Vietnam is marked by a remarkable history of borrowing from “abroad.” This includes “foreign” languages, cuisine, literature, ideology, religion, education, and political institutions… and incorporating them into the Vietnamese cultural matrix. In fact, Throughout history, Vietnamese have not only respected those with foreign learning, but they have venerated these individuals as imbued with special powers. This talk explores the phenomenon and considers what we in the 21st century can draw from such ideas to apply to our present age.

About the Speaker:

A historian of Southeast Asia by training, Dr. Jason A. Picard received his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley and MA in Asian Studies from Cornell University. Prior to arriving at VinUniversity, Dr. Picard served as lecturer of Modern Southeast Asian History at Loyola University Chicago’s Vietnam Center, teaching a variety of courses on Vietnam and Cambodia. He has been a Fellow at both Vietnam’s National Institute of Literature (2003-2004) and Institute of History (2007-2009). Dr. Picard is a proponent of Applied History, the use of historical precedents and analogues for understanding current challenges. His research interests include war, migration, social movements, economic history, literature, translation studies, Marxism-Leninism, Cold War history, and international history. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Fragmented Loyalties: How Vietnam’s Great Migration Destabilized a Nation and Altered a War examining the impact of one of the most crucial events of Vietnam’s 20th century, the migration of 1954-1955.