‘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 niche field of Southeast Asian history. This series is meant to be supplement the existing advice for academic job seekers rather than provide a beginners’ guide.
This post features my old cover letter that I used to apply for my position at UConn. It is well-known that the academic job market heavily favors employers. For me, one of the most difficult aspects of the “going on the market” was that I had to produce new documents unlike anything I had ever written and had to develop interviewing skills that were not part of graduate training. I had never seen a cover letter from a job candidate specializing in Southeast Asian history or Southeast Asian studies and had no idea how to write one. It took me three years on the market to secure a tenure-track offer, and my cover letters improved significantly each year.
This letter was from my third year on the market and aimed at a research university. It was part of the application package that landed me a preliminary interview (as distinct from the campus interview) at UConn, where I currently teach. The contents reflect my research at the time but bear no resemblance to my actual tenure project.
SAMPLE LETTER
I am applying for the Assistant Professor position in in Southeast Asian History at the University of Connecticut. I am a doctoral candidate in the History Department at UC Berkeley, where I study Southeast Asian history with a specialization in modern Vietnam. I am currently drafting the final chapter of my dissertation and will file in early spring.
My research focuses on anticommunist nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, 1954-1975, or South Vietnam) during the Vietnam War. Specifically, my dissertation examines state-sponsored nationalism under the rule of Ngô Đình Diệm (1954-1963) in the early years of the war. Conventional research depicts the Vietnam War as a conflict between foreign intervention and indigenous nationalism. But this interpretation conflates Vietnamese communism with Vietnamese nationalism and dismisses the RVN as a product of American neocolonialism. Based on my analysis of RVN archival and published sources, I argue that the war was part of a much longer conflict among Vietnamese that predated American involvement. During the resistance war against France (1945-1954), various nationalist groups joined together to fight French colonialism. But the nationalist alliance disintegrated during the latter half of the 1940s due to violent conflicts between communists and a variety of anticommunist groups. To emphasize the plural and factional character of Vietnamese nationalism following this initial schism, I propose the concept of “contested nationalism.” After 1954, Ngô Đình Diệm made anticommunism the central tenet of state nationalism. His government frequently contested Hanoi’s claim to represent the Vietnamese nation by citing the violence that communists wrought against the anticommunists during the schism. Yet the RVN itself became a site of contested nationalism, with the regime appropriating some forms of anticommunist nationalism while suppressing others. Diệm’s propagandists celebrated the secular forms of anticommunism that had originated in the north but denounced southern sectarian variants and thereby marginalized the south’s most prominent anticommunists. By demonstrating that the RVN possessed a dynamic nationalist culture, my project shows that the RVN was an integral part of the development of Vietnamese nationalism rather than an exception to it. My work also suggests the need to reassess nationalism in other neocolonial regimes during the Cold War. This reassessment may reveal that some of these regimes had indigenous roots despite their dependence on foreign powers.
My long-term research agenda is to build scholarly knowledge of the RVN, and I would like to construct a historical narrative that covers the entirety of the regime’s duration. For my next project, I will examine the post-Diệm democracy movement of the mid-1960s. Saigon was under military rule from 1963 to 1967, a fact which scholars take as evidence of the RVN’s antidemocratic character. But despite the authoritarian character of military rule, the period arguably marked the height of democratic activism in Vietnamese history. The democracy movement pushed the government to reestablish civilian rule and elections, and I would like to investigate the extent to which South Vietnamese political activists were successful in bringing about changes in an authoritarian political system.
Besides research, I am also passionate about teaching. I believe that my experience and training have prepared me for the position. I have two years of teaching experience, one as an assistant professor in the Asian Studies Program at the Asian University for Women (AUW) and one as a teaching assistant at Berkeley. My experience at two very different institutions has given me the opportunity to work with students of all levels and abilities and from diverse religious, ethnic, linguistic, and social backgrounds. At the University of Connecticut, I would be interested in teaching survey courses on Modern and Premodern Southeast Asian History and upper division courses on Vietnamese History, the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, and Colonialism in Southeast Asia. I would also like to develop new courses that bring together Asian history and Asian American studies, with topics such as the Southeast Asian refugee crisis or the changing construction of Asia by Europeans, Asians, and Americans. Possible graduate seminars include the Indochina Wars in the International Perspective and Comparative Nationalist Movements and Theories. One of my teaching ambitions is to increase undergraduate exposure to Southeast Asia, and I would welcome the opportunity to help shape the Asian history program.
I am attracted to the University of Connecticut because my research on the RVN complements the school’s strength on American foreign relations and contributes to its expansion of Asian studies. As part of my application materials, I am attaching a current CV and a writing sample. Letters from [Name], [Name], and [Name] will be posted separately. I hope to hear from you.
THE FEEDBACK I WOULD GIVE MYSELF
Looking back now, here’s what I think I did right:
- I described my dissertation project in the best possible light.
- I described only one concept rather than multiple concepts or theories, and I avoided jargon.
- I explained how my project contributed to the scholarship.
- I described a long-term intellectual trajectory beyond the dissertation/tenure project.
- I kept the section on teaching fairly short, as the letter was for a research school.
Here’s what I would do differently:
- I would make the description of my research in the second paragraph more succinct and streamlines. It’s a bit dense and rather long.