Nguyễn Mộng Giác’s One-Way Street (Đường một chiều, 1974) is an absolute page-turner. Set in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), the novel starts with the shocking murder of Thúy while her husband Major Lộc is away fighting in the Central Highlands as part of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. There’s …
Nhã Ca’s At Night I Hear the Cannons (Đêm nghe tiếng đại bác, 1966) poignantly captures the moment when the Vietnam War began encroaching on civilian life in Saigon. Set in the mid-1960s, the novel centers on a northern Vietnamese family of modest means who emigrated to Saigon when the country was divided a decade …
What makes a good job talk? I think about this question almost every winter. Not only do I receive this question from junior scholars that are on the market, my department has hired almost every year since my arrival at UConn, so I have listened to lots of job talks by this point. If you’re …
6. ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR APPLICATIONS: THE JOB TALK Read More »
Going on the academic job market for the first time was a profoundly weird experience for me. The process seemed completely divorced from everything I learned in grad school. Why did the application process bear so little resemblance to the very training that was a necessary qualification for the job? If you’re reading this post, …
5. ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR APPLICATIONS: PREPARING FOR THE PRELIMINARY INTERVIEW Read More »
Bình Nguyên Lộc’s Thoroughfare (Đò dọc, 1959) is a charming novel about migration and dislocation in southern Vietnam in the mid-1950s. Nam Thành and his wife are originally from a village in Bạc Liêu province in the Mekong delta, but they flee with their daughters to Saigon during the early years of the Resistance War …
FUN READS: MIGRATION AND DISLOCATION IN BÌNH NGUYÊN LỘC’S THOROUGHFARE (ĐÒ DỌC) Read More »
Grant proposals are the subject of yet another installment in my series sharing old application materials. I shared my old grant for the Fulbright-Hays in my last post, and this post makes available my old application for the Mellon-CLIR. Although the Mellon-CLIR has been discontinued, I include this application to show how I tailored my …
The third installment of this series is about grant proposals for dissertation fieldwork. All grad students who work on Vietnam will eventually have to travel there for research and it’s often the highlight of the grad school experience. But overseas research is expensive, and most students must apply for grants to fund their fieldwork or …
In this second installment of my series sharing old application materials, I make available two personal statements that I wrote when I applied to grad school. It was my very first time producing a personal statement (also known as a statement of purpose), and I could not find any good models to emulate. Instead, I …
‘Tis the season of applications! In this series, I share my old application materials in hopes that they will be useful to younger scholars. Although there is abundant advice on the internet about applications as well as sample applications, my own experience was that it was often difficult to apply that advice to my very …
1. ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR APPLICATIONS: SAMPLE COVER LETTER FOR THE ACADEMIC JOB MARKET Read More »