Sophie Quinn-Judge
Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture & Society
I had an adventurous life before undertaking Ph.D. Studies at the University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies) in 1997. From serving as a Quaker (AFSC) volunteer in South Vietnam in 1973-5, to running a program of conferences in Southeast Asia (1977-1982), to working in freelance journalism in Bangkok and Moscow, I gained invaluable first-hand experience of Southeast Asia and Eurasia as a whole. With the opening of the Comintern’s archives in 1992, I was able to combine my interests in Vietnam and the Soviet Union to start researching Ho Chi Minh and his years with the Comintern. This became Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2001).
Working in a Cold War research project at London School of Economics, I co-edited a volume of papers on the Third Indochina War and continued work on the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party, which led to a special edition of Cold War History on “New Evidence on the Cold War History of Vietnam: 1954-75,” including my essay on the “Anti-party Affair” in 1967-8.
Recently I have been working on the southern history of the Vietnam War and received an ACLS Fellowship for 2010 to complete my manuscript on The Elusive Third Way: The Search for a Third Force in Vietnam.