Nu-Anh Tran

Nu-Anh TranAssistant Professor of History and Asian and Asian American Studies

Wood Hall – Room 207
Phone: (860) 486 – 3565
Email: nu-anh.tran@uconn.edu

Growing up in Seattle’s Vietnamese-American community inspired Nu-Anh Tran’s interest in Vietnamese history. A joint appointment in the Department of History, her research interests broadly include the political, intellectual, and cultural history of the resistance war (1945-1954) and the Vietnam War (1954-1975). Her current project, Contested Identities: Nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), 1954-1963, examines nationalism in South Vietnam and conflicts between noncommunist nationalists during Ngô Đình Diệm’s rule. Based on archival and published sources from South Vietnam, her research argues that the Vietnam War was part of a historical rivalry between competing Vietnamese nationalists that dated back to the 1940s. This finding revises the conventional argument that the war was between Vietnamese nationalism and American intervention. Instead, the project proposes the concept of contested nationalism to emphasize the multiplicity of wartime nationalism and the signficance of internal Vietnamese conflicts.

Nu-Anh has received several prestigious fellowships, including the Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, the Fulbright-Hays DDRP (Vietnam), the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, and the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Studies. Her peer-reviewed article, “South Vietnamese Identity, American Intervention and the Newspaper Chính Luận [Political Discussion], 1965-1969,” was published in the inaugural volume of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. She has also written book reviews for H-Diplo and the Journal of Asian Studies, presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and organized a symposium featuring former leaders of South Vietnam at Cornell University.

Before coming to UConn, Nu-Anh taught at the Asian University for Women (2011-2) in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies, Academia Sinica (2013-4), in Taipei, Taiwan. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013 and received a BA from Seattle University in 2003.

Nu Anh Tran Curriculum Vitae 2015