4. ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR APPLICATIONS: SAMPLE GRANT PROPOSAL FOR DISSERTATION FIELDWORK (PART 2)

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 proposal to different grants. Careful readers may also notice that I recycled some material from the personal statement that I used when I applied to grad school.

The Mellon-CLIR application featured a series of questions, which have been rendered in italics below. I drafted a master version of my grant proposal and tailored it to the Mellon-CLIR by breaking up the proposal into shorter answers and revising those answers lightly to match the question. This particular grant favored projects that drew on newly available and little studied sources, so I emphasized that my fieldwork would do just that. Vietnam began opening up to Western researchers in the 1990s, and relatively few researchers had made use of its archives and libraries by the late aughts when I conducted dissertation fieldwork. Therefore, I highlighted the novelty of my sources and my previous experience working at Vietnamese research institutions. I also underscored that I would be using those materials to illuminate Vietnam’s domestic history rather than the history of US foreign relations as other scholars had done.

As with all of my old application materials, this proposal reflects my research interests and the scholarly debates at the time, not my current work.

SAMPLE GRANT PROPOSAL FOR THE MELLON-CLIR

Please provide, in no more than 1,000 words, a description of your proposed dissertation.  (Extend the space below as needed if you are writing this electronically; otherwise, add sheets.) Then please respond to the following questions.

My project examines the origins, evolution, and character of national identity in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, 1954-1975) and the significance of Republican nationalism in postcolonial Vietnamese history. Conventional scholarly wisdom assumes that the RVN lacked a strong sense of nationalism in contrast to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV),¹ but my preliminary research demonstrates the presence of a relatively dynamic national culture in the Republic and suggests its central importance to understanding the Vietnam War and modern Vietnamese history. I will focus on three important aspects of post-independence Republican nationalism: its relationship to colonial-era Vietnamese nationalism, its rivalry with DRV nationalism and Vietnamese communism, and its complex engagement with American intervention. By challenging scholarly characterizations of the RVN as a deviant political entity that evolved untouched by the greater development of modern Vietnamese nationalism, my project seeks to contribute to modern Vietnamese history, Vietnam War scholarship, and the theoretical literature on nationalism.

Post-independence Republican nationalism developed from colonial-era Vietnamese nationalism, but the Saigon regime and its population enhanced and suppressed particular continuities and discontinuities for political purposes. In contrast to conventional assumptions that the RVN lacked national identity, some limited scholarship suggests that the Republic represented a noncommunist alternative form of Vietnamese nationalism dating back to the colonial period. Tracing different strands of artistic and intellectual development, Neil Jamieson argues that the individualistic, effusively emotional literary trend that began in 1930s Hanoi continued and intensified in 1960s Saigon.² Influential interwar novels that, according to Hue-Tam Ho Tai, represented colonial progressivism, were considered national literary masterpieces in the Republic and enshrined in the public education curriculum.³ Archival sources show that the RVN Ministry of Education distributed scholarly classics written by colonial thinkers as academic prizes for the country’s most promising students.⁴ Thus, the regime attempted to teach its young generation an intellectual genealogy that made their nation-state the heir to colonial-era nationalism and intellectual activity.

The relationship between Republican nationalism and its communist counterpart was antagonistic since the RVN was established as the political rival to the Vietnamese communist movement and the DRV state. Recently, scholars interested in the Ngô Đình Diệm presidency have explored the regime’s promotion of Personalism as an ideological alternative to communism.⁵ In my preliminary archival work, RVN government officials routinely justified their demands for educational improvement and the restoration of national culture by criticizing the damage communism had caused to Vietnamese tradition and advocated their reforms as an ideological weapon to combat the political enemy.⁶ But it remains unclear how the population responded to anti-DRV state nationalism and how they conceived of the southern national community in relation to its ethnically identical communist rivals. Besides studying the regime’s official ideology, I plan to examine the social reception of state nationalism.

The American presence represented a potential threat to RVN nationalism because it could undermine the country’s nationalist credentials, particularly after the introduction of American ground troops in 1965. The RVN state and pro-Saigon population had to find new ways to affirm their national identity without rejecting foreign assistance, while those opposed to American intervention sought to mobilize Vietnamese nationalism against foreign domination. In Hai mươi năm văn học Miền Nam, 1954-1975 (Twenty Years of South Vietnamese Literature, 1954-1975), Võ Phiến argues that the Vietnamese perceived the American presence as a threat to their cultural identity; in response to foreign domination, a new trend of nativist, nationalist scholarship emerged, which he terms về nguồn, or returning to the source.⁷ Similarly, in my recently published article, I argue that the American presence prompted many Vietnamese to highlight cultural differences between themselves and their foreign allies and to define their identity in relation to an antique Vietnamese past and traditional Vietnamese womanhood.⁸ My research will be grounded in the theoretical literature on the cultural construction of nationalism. Benedict Anderson argues that print capitalism, new communication technology, and the circulation of symbols and symbolic objects such as maps and flags helped give rise to a national “imagined community.”⁹ Mosse finds that national monuments, public festivals, and the commemorative practices of social and political organizations in modern Europe created a “secular liturgy” that successfully incorporated the masses into the nation-state through the usage of myths and symbols.¹⁰ Drawing on Anderson’s more popular “imagined community” and Mosse’s state-promulgated “secular liturgy,” my project will explore how nationalism was constructed and contested within state-society relations. I will examine nationalist discourse as a dialogue between state and non-state actors. My approach juxtaposes the national identity promoted by the regime through public education, government-controlled media, propaganda, and official cultural policy with that found in non-state nationalist discourse. Was the state-society dialogue characterized by agreement, contestation, competition, or antagonism? Did state and non-state actors draw upon different aspects of colonial-era constructions of identity, and did they differ in how they defined themselves in relation to communist Vietnamese and allied Americans?

First, I will use the Asia Collections of the Kroch Library at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. I intend to spend three months consulting the Asia Collections, [month] through [month, year].

Second, I will conduct research in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, at two major repositories: the National Archives Center II (NACII) and the General Sciences Library (GSL). At the NACII, I will examine three collections: the Office of the RVN President Collection, the Office of the Prime Minister Collection, and the various collections of the Ministry of Culture, Education, and Youth. I will also check the availability of collections for other government ministries that may have been reindexed since [last summer], my last visit to the NACII. At the GSL, formerly the RVN’s National Library, I will use the Restricted Collections (works published before 1975). I plan to spend nine months consulting these collections at the NACII and the GSL, from [month, year] to [month, year].

My research will use little studied and newly available sources from the RVN period. Until recently, the RVN remained too politically sensitive to study in Vietnam, but access to RVN-period sources have improved dramatically in recent years, and the NACII is now open to foreign researchers with local institutional affiliation. I will consult newly available government documents of the Saigon regime housed at the NACII. Because the NACII is in the midst of a comprehensive re-indexing project, even recent dissertations have been unable to utilize the Office of the Prime Minister Collection, which is much richer and more voluminous than the Office of the President Collection. As both collections have been fully re-indexed and are available to researchers, my dissertation will be one of the first to draw upon both collections. If available, I will also consult the collections of the various government ministries.

Beyond issues of availability, RVN sources are little studied because Vietnam War scholars have avoided them. Even major Saigon newspapers, popular novels, and influential RVN-produced scholarly works available in the US have not been used systematically. Until the last half decade, American historians of the war either lacked Vietnamese language skills or assumed that these sources did not matter or were inherently unreliable or inauthentic. By making Republican sources the empirical foundation and the primary focus of my research, I am challenging scholarly dismissals of their significance and value. Recently, a handful of Americanist historians have begun researching the Ngô Đình Diệm presidency, but they generally do not draw heavily on non-government sources. In contrast, my research will utilize non-state newspapers, novels, popular magazines, scholarly journals, influential scholarly and literary works, television and radio programs, music, and movies. Not typically used to study the Vietnamese side of the war, these sources are arguably some of the most relevant ones for understanding how the war was experienced by the Vietnamese population.

I seek to read my sources in innovative and interdisciplinary ways. The new generation of Vietnam War scholars, such as Philip Catton, Edward Miller, and Matthew Masur, generally inform their examination of state documents with interests in elite politics and international relations. In contrast, I will read government documents through a culturally informed lens to focus on domestic history. How did the government define the place of the RVN within the greater development of Vietnamese history to construct an authentic nationalism? In its educational and cultural policies, how did it seek to deploy culture for political purposes? Unlike the work of political historians who have analyzed cultural discourse only for their political utility, such as David Marr, my politically-informed reading of non-government sources will treat ideas and culture seriously. I want to examine how Vietnamese living under the Saigon regime defined their culture and the place of the RVN within it, how these definitions shaped their understanding of nationalism, and how they used cultural discourse to advance various pro-war, anti-war, neutralist, and other political agendas. By using non-state sources, I am moving beyond the scholarly focus on elite politics to examine social reception and competition to state nationalism. My historical analysis of sources that are often considered the domain of literary or cultural studies, such as music, radio programs, novels, and movies, will introduce an interdisciplinary dimension to my project.

The repositories I am consulting, Cornell University Library, the NACII, and the GSL, do not provide financial assistance to researchers.

I firmly believe that my post-secondary education, language ability, and previous research experience have well prepared me to conduct the proposed research. I earned a BA from Seattle University with a double major in history and French (June 2003) and an MA in history from University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis on Southeast Asian history (May 2006). I am continuing in the history PhD program at Berkeley, where my major field is Southeast Asian history, my minor field is American history, and my third field is Southeast Asian studies. My graduate coursework at Berkeley includes seminars in historical theory, nineteenth century European history useful for understanding colonial Vietnam, modern American history useful for understanding the American involvement in Vietnam, and Southeast Asian history seminars in which I have conducted research based on Vietnamese-language sources. While my undergraduate and graduate training in history have prepared me to pose historical questions and analyze primary sources, my graduate specialization in Southeast Asia has provided the background to apply those skills to Vietnamese history.

My near-native fluency in Vietnamese and proficiency in French have prepared me to analyze primary sources, which are primarily in Vietnamese but also in English and French. I grew up reading Vietnamese, earned a bilingual English/Vietnamese diploma from the International Baccalaureate program while still in high school (2003), and have spent several summers in Vietnam. In graduate school, I have taken Vietnamese literature classes at Berkeley and in Ho Chi Minh City at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) and the University of Pedagogy. My Vietnamese-language coursework includes a colonial literature course (1900-1945), a war-era literature course (1954-1975), and independent readings on colonial scholarly classics. Thus, besides mere fluency, I have acquired a background in literary responses to the Vietnam War and the colonial-era intellectual foundations of Republican nationalism. I am also proficient in French from my undergraduate major in French and a six-month study abroad in Grenoble, France.

Besides fluency, I have conducted both library and archival research using Vietnamese-language primary sources. My first seminar paper analyzes the anti-American children’s novel, Giặc Ô-kê (The Okay Invaders), in which the author Duyên Anh commands young readers to emulate Vietnamese historical heroes instead of worshipping American superheroes and to demonstrate to Americans their patriotism through proper conduct and model citizenship. My recent article, published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, explores identity constructions within the discourse on the American presence in the prominent Saigon newspaper, Chính Luận (Political Discussion), from 1965 to 1969. I found that the encounter with Americans prompted Vietnamese writers to define their identity using the past and the image of the proper Vietnamese womanhood and delineate boundaries to group membership. These constructions of identity represent certain continuities with the colonial era but were clearly modified by the dialogical relationship between the two unequal allies.

I have also familiarized myself with the document collections that will form the archival basis of my research and acquired affiliation with local Vietnamese institutions. I spent [previous summer] in Ho Chi Minh City conducting pre-dissertation research, where I examined archival sources on public education and cultural policy at the National Archives Center II (NACII) and published materials at the General Sciences Library (GSL). At the NACII, I worked with the two reindexed RVN collections most familiar to foreign researchers, the Office of the RVN President and the Office of the Prime Minister Collections. In addition, I discovered the existence of the various collections from the Office of Culture, Education, and Youth, which the staff does not regularly recommend to researchers. I also browsed used bookstores and compared them with the collections at the GSL and Cornell University to determine the availability of published sources. Because research at the GSL and NACII require affiliation with a Vietnamese institution, I have established affiliation with the USSH. The USSH has already demonstrated their willingness to officially sponsor my dissertation research with a letter of affiliation.

In addition to the above training and experience, other achievements and honors attest to my scholarly potential. As an undergraduate, I received Seattle University’s [description of undergraduate scholarship], the [university-level paper prize], and a [national history paper prize] (the two prizes were for different papers). As a graduate student, I was awarded the [external fellowship] and Berkeley’s [description of university-level fellowship, year]. My conference experience includes presentations at the [undergraduate research conference] and the [graduate research conference, year]. Recently, my abovementioned article, entitled, “South Vietnamese Identity, American Intervention and the Newspaper Chính Luận [Political Discussion], 1965-1969,” was published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. In addition, I have worked as a research assistant and history grader at Seattle University, Inglemoor High School, and the Berkeley History Department.

5. What is important about your proposed dissertation for scholarship in your field?

My project aims to contribute to the historiography on Vietnam by treating the RVN as a distinct unit of analysis located within longer trends of modern Vietnamese history. The dominant narrative, constructed by scholars such as David Marr,argues that the anticolonial, nationalist project led directly, exclusively, and inevitably to the DRV state.¹¹ Conflating specifically DRV nationalism with Vietnamese nationalism, this communist teleology fails to explore the RVN’s colonial roots and figures it as a political deviation from the dominant trend of Vietnamese history. By examining the RVN’s relationship with colonial-era nationalism, my project follows the model of alternative nationalism suggested by Jamieson and others to reevaluate the RVN’s place within modern Vietnamese history. I anticipate that the supposedly deviant RVN will fit awkwardly within the historical developments that most scholars have considered the dominant developments. Thus, undermining RVN exceptionalism revises the DRV-centered narrative as well as scholarly interpretations of what constitutes the most central trends in modern Vietnamese history.

Besides Vietnamese history, my project will contribute to the scholarship of the Vietnam War. Focused on international, military, and political developments, the conventional war scholarship dismisses the RVN as an illegitimate American puppet and a dysfunctional, inauthentic pseudo-state.¹² But these assertions are not grounded in empirical scholarship on the RVN’s domestic politics, civil society, intellectual activities, and popular political culture. Only recently have Americanist historians devoted more attention to the Republic; their work returns agency to Vietnamese actors and assigns equal causality to American and internal RVN developments. Focusing on Vietnamese-American relations, Philip Catton, Edward Miller, and Matthew Masur have argued that Ngô Đình Diệm’s government developed and pursued a vision of modernizing the RVN independent of American influence.¹³ My research will extend their arguments by examining the post-Diệm period in addition to Diệm’s presidency and contextualizing Republican nationalism within a domestic intellectual genealogy and contemporary social environment. Moving beyond their scholarship, I will more forcefully interrogate the assumption that the population lacked a strong sense of identification with the southern nation-state by concentrating on Republican identity construction. The focus on domestic history will enable scholars to finally address seriously the unstudied of issues of RVN authenticity and legitimacy.

Besides increasing scholarly understanding of the RVN as a distinct political entity, the study of Republican nationalism promises to fundamentally revise scholarly understanding of the Vietnam War. Conventional accounts hold that the communist victory can, to some extent, be attributed to the strength of nationalist sentiment in the DRV and the absence or weakness of nationalism in the RVN. Scholars have argued that the communist movement exclusively embodied contemporary nationalist sentiment and was the heir to a traditional anticolonial nationalism dating back to the late nineteenthcentury or earlier.¹⁴ These explanations are inadequate because they ignore competing national identities. If the Republic represented an alternative nationalism, then more precise explanations are needed to account for the DRV’s victory. What specific characteristics of DRV and RVN nationalism help explain the outcome of the Vietnam War? How did North Vietnamese constructions of nationalism differ from Republican policies? If both were nationalistic, how important was nationalism as a factor in the DRV’s defeat of the RVN? Do other factors hold more explanatory power? Framed as a war between competing Vietnamese nationalisms rather than capitalist Washington and communist Hanoi, an RVN-centered interpretation reveals the inadequacy of the accepted “nationalism arguments” and necessitates the search for entirely different explanations for the evolution and outcome of the Vietnam War. Lastly, research on the RVN will contribute to the general scholarship on nationalism by furthering scholarly understanding of the relationship between nationalism and foreign domination. Scholars have argued that non-Western nationalisms trace their origins to contact with the West.¹⁵ In the case of the colonial Philippines, Vicente Rafael contends that the translation of the colonizer’s language, ideas, and culture actually enabled nationalism. Simultaneously accepting and rejecting elements of colonialism, Philippine nationalism mediated a force that was both alien and intimate.¹⁶ If colonialism both enables and threatens colonial nationalism, as Rafael believes, what is the relationship between foreign domination and post-independence nationalism? How do early nationalist states acknowledge the existence of a foreign patron while claiming nationalist legitimacy? The RVN is a particularly appropriate case study because post-independence contradictions were especially stark in the Republic’s politically and ethnically incongruent situation; Republican nationalist discourse was affected by the presence of a foreign political ally, the Americans, and the existence of an ethnically identical political rival, the DRV. My research promises to suggest news ways of conceptualizing nationalism by furthering our understanding of how autonomous identities within nationalist discourses can be constructed to accommodate foreign domination.

THE FEEDBACK I WOULD GIVE MYSELF

For other things I think I did right and that I would do differently, see my previous post.

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1. Variations of this argument can be found in David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971); Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925-1945 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982);George McT. Kahin, Intervention (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987); George Herring, America’s Longest War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (New York: Pantheon, 1985). ↩︎
2. Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). ↩︎
3. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). ↩︎
4. “Hồ sơ về việc tặng phần thưởng cho học sinh vào dịp cuối niên học năm 1956-1963” [Records concerning the distribution of prizes to students at the end of the academic year, 1956-1963], Folder 17982, Office of the RVN President Collections (First Republic), National Archives Center II (hereafter NACII). ↩︎
5. Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 25-50. ↩︎
6. See for example “Kiến-nghị của Hội Đồng Quốc Gia về việc chấn hưng văn hóa” [Resolution of the National Committee concerning cultural restoration], 15 Dec 1954, Folder 29111, Office of the Prime Minister Collection, NACII; Letter, Secretary of Reform Nguyễn Đức Thuần to the Primer Minister, 5 Jan 1955, Folder 29186, Office of the Prime Minister Collection, NACII; Representative Nguyễn Thiệu, “Quan niệm về giáo dục dưới chính thể cộng hòa hiện tại” [Educational concepts under the present republican regime], Vietnam Presse Release 2145, 14 Jan 1957 (afternoon), Office of the RVN President Collection (First Republic), NACII. ↩︎
7. Võ Phiến, Hai mươi năm văn học Miền Nam, 1954-1975 [Twenty Years of South Vietnamese Literature, 1954-1975] (Westminster, Cal.: Văn Nghệ, 1986). ↩︎
8. Nu-Anh Tran, “South Vietnamese Identity, American Intervention and the Newspaper Chính Luận [Political Discussion], 1965-1969,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1-2 (February/August 2006): 169-209. ↩︎
9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed.(London and New York: Verso, 1991). ↩︎
10. George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). ↩︎
11. David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981);Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925-1945 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982). ↩︎
12. George McT. Kahin, Intervention (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987); Frederik Logevall, Choosing War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1976); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (New York: Pantheon, 1985). ↩︎
13. Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Edward Miller, “Grand Designs: Vision, Power, and Nation-Building in America’s Alliance with Ngô Đình Diệm, 1954-1960” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004); Matthew Masur, “Hearts and Minds: Cultural Nation-Building in South Vietnam, 1954-1963” (PhD diss., Ohio State Universiy, 2004). ↩︎
14. David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971); Huynh, Vietnamese Communism; Kahin, Intervention; George Herring, America’s Longest War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002); Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991); Young, The Vietnam Wars; Kolko, Anatomy of a War. ↩︎
15. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). ↩︎
16. Vicente Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). ↩︎