Apply for a grant to attend the NEH Higher Education Faculty Institute's "Fifty Years Later: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Veterans, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian Refugees" at Coastline.
Coastline College invites applications for participation in an NEH Higher Education Faculty Institute titled, "Fifty Years Later: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Veterans, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian Refugees" to support scholars who wish to pursue up-to-date research on the Vietnam War and its impact on the world.
The Institute will educate a cohort of 36 scholars - including unaffiliated scholars, adjunct professors, and part-time faculty from a range of disciplines, institution type, and geographical locations. The cohort will be supported by a faculty composed of authors, Vietnamese refugees and first-generation Vietnamese Americans, Vietnam veterans, and Vietnamese studies and literary arts scholars.
The Institute has been organized as a hybrid, multi-phased presentational and instructional program:
This one-week in-person phase will introduce participants to present-day studies of the Vietnam War from multiple presenters. View the schedule.
This one-week virtual program is for further study from multiple, advanced perspectives on the war. View the schedule.
*For the first week, participants should plan to arrive June 11th and depart June 17th. Stipends will help cover participant travel, lodging, and per diem expenses for the in-person component.
The application is open to faculty of all ranks, graduate researchers, and independent scholars. More details can be found in the Participant Eligibility Criteria (PDF).
The following application materials should be sent to Dr. Marilyn Brock, Project Director, Coastline College, at mvbrock@coastline.edu no later than March 3, 2023:
Apply Now: Email Marilyn Brock
Notification of Acceptance: April 3, 2023
"Fifty Years Later: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Veterans, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian Refugees" will be offered by Coastline College to enhance undergraduate teaching and learning about the vast intricacies and complexities of the Vietnam War.
The Institute program is designed to meet the needs of educators in community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and universities who are introducing students to culturally relevant curriculum and providing veterans and Southeast Asian students more access to meaningful content.
The material is particularly relevant to student groups from Little Saigon, which is the physical location of one of Coastline College’s campuses, the Le-Jao Center, in Westminster, California. Additionally, Coastline College’s Garden Grove campus borders the outskirts of Little Saigon. The program will focus on sources from experienced writers, veterans, researchers, historians, and artists on new and multifaceted perspectives on the Vietnam War, including deep and context-rich engagement with key themes, research, reflection, and primary texts.
The program will help participants to develop curricular materials for humanities courses on history, art, literature, philosophy, music, and additional areas like psychology, sociology, and political science. It will engage such themes as war, diaspora, narrative and narratology, cultural pluralism, and international relations. This program will build connections with higher education professionals across America, in Vietnam, Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees in Little Saigon and nationwide, veterans, active military students, and scholars interested in furthering their knowledge about humanities and the experience of war in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War is regularly studied as America’s lost war in a range of undergraduate history courses, but its greater meaning and its myriad causes and effects, such as the Sino-Russian fallout, leadership in the North by Le Duan, covert operations, American media coverage, postcolonial transfigurations, government motives and transparency, and more, can be studied on a deeper interdisciplinary scale (Hunt, 2010). There is reason to educate higher education undergraduate instructors about the topic and introduce content in regard to recent scholarship on the Vietnam War in history and other humanities courses. Recent research on the war has uncovered digital, physical, and visual artifacts can be studied in context with a wider degree of disciplines, such as art, philosophy, literature, language, religion, linguistics, drama, music, and psychology. Increased globalization and ties with Asian countries gives the opportunity to expand learning to perspectives outside of an exclusive American timeline to include the narratives of more people, including the veterans, the Vietnamese, individuals identified with the Vietnamese diaspora, scholars in both American and Vietnam, writers, academics, and contemporary historians. These contemporary insights into the Vietnam War will be developed further in the realm of undergraduate curricula (von Wright, 2002).
Moreover, there is benefit to teaching students to “be an intelligent reader of another person’s story” (Nussbaum, 1996). In “Narrative Imagination and Taking the Perspective of Others,” Moira von Wright discusses how critical examination and reflection increases humanity and citizenship (2002). The study of war is connected to the human experience as much as language. Poet Robin Coste Lewis quotes, “The history of English is inextricably tied to the history of war, to the history of empire; they cannot be separated from these histories. Language is one of the most powerful weapons of war. It is also one of the war’s first victims” (2016). The institute will study narratology in regard to the experience of the Vietnam War to research how the narratives of veterans, refugees, and others affect perception of the war, history, and memorialization.
Finally, it is crucial, in the context of present-day race relations, to further the understanding of cultural pluralism, such as the reality of the residents of the community of Little Saigon. The refugee experience as described by those identified with the Vietnamese diaspora, is one that has affected millions due to the 20th century wars. Greater understanding and identification of the alienation that accompanies the returns of war will benefit undergraduate students in their humanistic development and societal relations with cultural pluralism and difference.
The Vietnam War is one of the United States' most storied and gut-wrenching wars. It began when television first began making its way into citizens' living rooms, and the actual faces of politicians, such as JFK, LBJ, and Nixon became faces that all Americans knew. Coverage on the Vietnam War brought about great dissent and protests were organized all over the country.
Eventually, President Nixon signed a peace treaty to end the war; this was in part due to the intense heat of the anti-war protesting. Subsequently, the year after Nixon resigned from the presidency, North Vietnam violated that peace treaty and invaded South Vietnam, causing the United States to ultimately lose its stake in the war.
Vietnam was united as a communist country. However, according to historians, the war was not only a civil one between North and South Vietnam, but also the result of the far larger international cold war conflict, involving several additional countries (Hunt, 2010). The role that the United States played in this conflict was to fight the global spread of communism as threatened by the dominating international forces of the U.S.S.R. and China.
Following North Vietnam’s victory, the evacuees from South Vietnam largely settled in Orange County, California, the largest resettlement of Vietnamese in the country (Bui, 2018).
The Vietnamese population in Little Saigon remains close to 200,000 according to present data, the largest concentration of Vietnamese in America (Alperin & Batalova, 2018). The resettlement introduced Vietnamese music, as well as a host of Vietnamese art, food, and culture to Southern California (Valverde, 2003).
Twitter page @neh_vietnam
1 Week | 2 Weeks | 3 Weeks | 4 Weeks | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Projects with Residential Components | $1,300 | $2,200 | $2,850 | $3,450 |
Fully-Virtual Projects | $650 | $1,100 | $1,425 | $1,725 |
All participant travel, lodging, food, and most transportation is to be paid to participants by the NEH institute stipend award. Participant Stipends are taxable as income.
The following recommended hotels are within 5 miles from Westminster Le-Jao campus. Hotel costs will be paid out of each participant's stipend fund.
Newport Beach is a southern California beach city about an hour south of Los Angeles. The Newport Beach harbor consists of the Upper Newport Bay, an ecological reserve, and Lower Newport Bay, which features Balboa Island, Cannery Village, and the Balboa Fun Park on Balboa Peninsula. Disneyland Resort is close by in Anaheim, California, as well as the nearby beach cities of Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, and Long Beach. Little Saigon is located in the neighboring cities of Westminster, Fountain Valley, and Garden Grove.
NEH Seminars, Institutes, and Landmarks programs are intended to extend and deepen knowledge and understanding of the humanities by focusing on significant topics, texts, and issues; contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of participants; and foster a community of inquiry that provides models of excellence in scholarship and teaching.
NEH expects that project directors will take responsibility for encouraging an ethos of openness and respect, upholding the basic norms of civil discourse.
Seminar, Institute, and Landmarks presentations and discussions should be:
This grant opportunity has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this webpage do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Endowment programs do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or age. For further information, write to the Equal Opportunity Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities, 400 7th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20024. TDD: 202-606-8282 (this is a special telephone device for the Deaf).