Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Van Nguyen Marshall, (Associate Professor of History at Trent University), who will discuss associational life in South Vietnam, 1954-1975.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests, and carry out their activities.

About the Speaker

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University with particular research interests in Modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008) and the recently published Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).