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Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

Professor Hunt’s current research interests are the Vietnam War and 20th-century Vietnam, peasant studies, the French Revolution and French social history, politics and culture, and world history in the early-modern period.

Degrees

PhD (History) Harvard University

Professional Publications & Contributions

• Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst: UMass Press, 2008).
• "Dirty Wars: Counter-Insurgency in Vietnam and Today," Politics and Society 38.1 (2010): 35-66.
• "Taking Notice of the Everyday,” in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives, eds. Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 171-197.
• “Limits of Revolutionary State Building in Southern Vietnam,” sponsored by the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence, at Yale University, December 3, 2010.
• “Land to Till and a Car to Ride in,” as part of a colloquium on “Remembering Vietnam: The Last Memoir of War in the Mekong Delta,” sponsored by the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy and the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture, and Society, at Temple University, November 11, 2010.
• “Anticipation on a Social History of the Vietnam War,” Council on Southeast Asia Studies Seminar Series, Yale University, April 14, 2010.
• “The Disposable Strategy: Counter-Insurgency in Vietnam,” at a conference on “Reconsidering Counterinsurgency,” Santa Fe Institute, March 22, 2008.

Additional Information

Spring 2013 Office Hours: MWF (2-3 p.m.) or by appointment

My current research is on everyday life in the villages of the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. My book, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution (UMass Press, 2008), is part of a larger attempt to write a social history of the war. It includes chapters on peasants and the urban/rural divide; the concerted uprising of 1959-1960; utopianism and violence of the popular movement; generational and gender conflicts at village level; the 1965 escalation and subsequent scattering of the rural population; quotidian encounters between Vietnamese and Americans; disruptions in conceptions of time and space; and the dual parentage of the Tet Offensive. Ethnography of Revolution (in progress) explores relations between the Vietnamese Communist Party and a peasantry animated by modernist currents that coincided with and diverged from party blueprints. The text includes discussion of household economies and the interplay between customary and monetized forms of exchange; religious practice; land issues and struggles; oral, scribal, written, and electronic communication; and other aspects in line with an “ethnographic” approach to the events of the 1960s.

Courses Offered

• HIST 224G: Revolutionaries
• HON 242: The Cold War: The Asian View
• HIST 330: The French Revolution
• HIST 345: Capitalist Revolution
• HIST 357: The Vietnam War

A Note on Classroom Participation

Professor Hunt's CV