Strange but Familiar: Connected Histories between Poland and Vietnam after 1955

Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Harvard University/University of Vienna

Linh.nguyen-vu@univie.ac.at
tnguyenvu@fas.harvard.edu

My talk will chronicle the cultural, personal, and educational contacts between Poland and Vietnam by examining how these interactions developed over the course of the second half of the twentieth century—after decolonization, amid the Second Indochina War and against the backdrop of global socialism. Drawing on a diversity of sources from Poland and Vietnam, this talk will excavate these robust, but largely forgotten shared histories. By zooming in on new institutions, pedagogical and cultural exchanges, personal connections, and grassroots experiences, I will show how these contacts were forged and operated on various scales, involving multiple agents and shaping future trajectories. While these complex exchanges were often overtly political, they also tended to be intimate, leading to wayward encounters beyond the official public sphere and reaching far into the private sphere. Although tethered to unanticipated and often global political crises, some of these contacts—personal and institutional—proved to be enduring and continue until today.

Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ is a German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. Nguyễn Vũ is a cultural historian with an interest in interdisciplinary approaches to the history of socialism. She has held visiting positions at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2014-2015), Columbia University (2016) and New York University (2018-2019). Her work has been published in Cahiers du Monde Russe (2021), East European Politics and Society (2024), and History Workshop Journal (2016), as well as in non-scholarly outlets such as TAZ, Zeitgeschicteonline, Szum, and krytykapolityczna.pl.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024
12:00 Noon
Room 203, Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Avenue

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