NEH Higher Education Faculty Institute at Coastline

Fifty Years Later: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Veterans, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian Refugees

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.

Dates & Locations

The Institute has been organized as a hybrid, multi-phased presentational and instructional program:

June 12 - 16, 2023*

Newport Beach, CA

This one-week in-person phase will introduce participants to present-day studies of the Vietnam War from multiple presenters. View the schedule.

June 19 - 23, 2023

Online

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 11^th and depart June 17^th. Stipends will help cover participant travel, lodging, and per diem expenses for the in-person component.

Eligibility

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).

How to Apply

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:

• A statement (maximum 3 pages) that directly addresses the following prompt:
  • Describe your interest in the Higher Education Faculty Institute on the Vietnam War.
  • What is your background as a higher education educator?
  • How will your participation in the Institute contribute to expanding Vietnam War research and scholarship at your institution or in your field?
• Current C.V.

Apply Now: Email Marilyn Brock

Notification of Acceptance: April 3, 2023

ABOUT THE PROJECT

"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.

• Student Needs

  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

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.

LITTLE SAIGON IN ORANGE COUNTY

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).

More Info for Participants

Twitter page @neh_vietnam

• Participant Stipends

  Participant Stipends

  	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.

• Hotel Accomodations

  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.

  Hotel Huntington Beach

  7667 Center Ave

  Huntington Beach, CA 92647

  Springhill Suites by Marriott Huntington Beach Orange County

  7872 Edinger Ave

  Huntington Beach, CA 92647

  Comfort Inn & Suites Huntington Beach

  16301 Beach Blvd

  Huntington Beach, CA 92647

  The Westin South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa

  686 Anton Boulevard

  Costa Mesa, CA 92626

• Newport Beach | Orange County

  Newport Beach and Coastal Orange County Environs

  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.

• Participant Expectations
  • Participants are required to submit a project evaluation.
  • Project applicants who accept an offer to participate are expected to remain during the entire period of the program and to participate in its work on a full-time basis. If a participant is obliged through special circumstances to depart before the end of the program, it shall be the recipient institution's responsibility to see that only a pro rata share of the stipend is received or that the appropriate pro rata share of the stipend is returned if the participant has already received the full stipend.
  • Once an applicant has accepted an offer to attend any NEH Summer Program (Seminar, Institute, or Landmark), they may not accept an additional offer or withdraw in order to accept a different offer.
• Principles of Civility

  Principles of Civility for NEH Professional Development Programs

  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:

  • firmly grounded in rigorous scholarship, and thoughtful analysis;
  • conducted without partisan advocacy;
  • respectful of divergent views;
  • free of ad hominem commentary; and
  • devoid of ethnic, religious, gender, disability, or racial bias.
• Presenters

  Institute Presenters

  • Vu Tran, Author of Nationally Acclaimed Novel "Dragonfish", Professor, University of Chicago
  • Yen Le Espiritu, Author of "Departures" and "Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees", Critical Theorist, Professor, University of San Diego
  • Alexander Parini, Global Politics & American Studies Lecturer, Hoa Sen University
  • Michael Griffith, Author, Professor, University of Cincinnati
  • Amihan April C. Mella-Alcazar, Fullbright Scholar, Critical Theorist, & President of University of Pasig City
  • Denton Knapp, Bobby McDonald, and Andy McTigue, Vietnam War Veterans
  • Tuyet Mai Dinh, Southeast Asian Vietnam War Refugee, CFO, VP Sales & Marketing at Little Saigon TV Network
  • Thuy Do Vang, Southeast Asian Vietnam War Refugee, Author, Speaker, Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, Curator for the UC Irvine Libraries Southeast Asian Archive
  • Phuong Nguyen, Associate Professor of U.S. History; School of Humanities & Communication, Chair; California State University, Monterey Bay; Author of Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon
  • Hong Lam, Lecturer, presenter from Vietnam
  • Van Vinh, Lecturer, presenter from Vietnam

  Institute Coastline Faculty Presenters

  • Dan Johnson, History Professor
  • Marilyn Brock, Author, English Professor
• Organizers / Teams

  Grant Team

  • Darian Aistrich, Grant Development Specialist
  • Marilyn Brock, English and Humanities Department Co-Chair, English Professor, Project Director
  • Dana Emerson, Dean of Instruction, Le-Jao Center, Grant Administrator
  • Aeron Zentner, Dean of Institutional Effectiveness: Research, Analytics, Accessibility, Accreditation, Planning, and Grants

  Institute Team

  • Marilyn Brock, Project Director
  • David M. Lee, Replacement Project Director

  Participant Selection Team

  • Scott Davis
  • David Fuchs
  • Dan Johnson
  • Sasha Montero