Peter Zinoman
Friday, March 1, 2024
UCI Humanities Gateway 1030
11 am to 12 pm
Encounters with Vietnam: Peter Zinoman on a Career of Translating, Traveling, Writing, and Editing
This event will take the form of a dialogue between Peter Zinoman of UC Berkeley and Jeffrey Wasserstrom of UCI, who will serve as interlocutor and pose the first questions to the visiting speaker before opening things up to questions from the floor.
2 pm to 3:30 pm
The Rise and Fall of Vietnamese Reform Communism in the 1950sThis talk will be given by visiting speaker Peter Zinoman of the UC Berkeley History Department, who will be introduced by Diu-Huong Nguyen of UCI's History Department. It will examine the Nhan Van Giai Pham movement of 1956, one of the most important episodes of domestic political opposition in the history of communist Vietnam. The speaker will discuss the mix of local and global forces that gave rise to the movement, analyze its political agenda, and detail the brutal campaign launched against it by the communist party-state. The talk will also consider how Vietnamese political culture has been shaped over the long term by the history of the movement and its repression.
Peter Zinoman is a Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (2001) and Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (2014), and the co-translator of Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Trong Phung (2002), an important work of fiction by one of Vietnam's major modern writers. The founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Zinoman's current research focus is politics and intellectual life in Hanoi, a city in which he spent a great deal of time, including as a Fulbright Fellow in 2008-2009.
