Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a talk by Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ. Moderated by Malgorzata Mazurek.
"Strange but Familiar" examines the cultural, personal, and educational contacts between Poland and Vietnam after decolonization, amid the Second Indochina War, and against the backdrop of global socialism. Drawing on archival research (in official and vernacular archives) and oral history interviews conducted in Poland and Vietnam, this talk will excavate these robust, but largely forgotten shared histories. By zooming in on new institutions that were founded to facilitate these global connections and personal bonds, the talk will show that while these complex exchanges were at times overtly political, they also tended to be intimate and wayward.
Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ (she/her) is a cultural historian of modern Poland and Vietnam with a strong interest in interdisciplinary approaches. She 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. Before joining RECET, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Free University of Berlin. She earned her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence and was a visiting scholar at, among others, German Historical Institute in Warsaw and Columbia University. Linh has published in Cahiers du Monde Russe, East European Politics and Societies, History Workshop Journal, and non-scholarly outlets (zeitgeschiche-online, TAZ, krytykapolityczna.pl).