Christopher Goscha

Christopher Goscha was born in 1965. His family is originally from Kansas in the United States.

From 1983 to 1987, he studied at the School of Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., United States[2]. From 1988, he pursued a Master's degree at the Australian National University in Canberra where he defended a thesis entitled "Thailand and the Vietnamese resistance against the French, 1885-1949" in 1991[3]. He obtained his Masters in 1994 in France at the Université Paris Diderot. His Masters thesis under the direction of Pierre Brocheux, entitled "Le premier échec contre-révolutionnaire au Vietnam" (The First Counter-Revolutionary Failure in Vietnam) deals with the non-communist national culture in Vietnam (1925-1947)[4].

He spent several years in the Indochinese peninsula in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. In particular, he underwent intensive language training at the National University of Vietnam in Hanoi[5].

In 2000, he defended his doctoral thesis at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (IV Section, Historical and Philological Sciences) under the supervision of Nguyễn Thế Anh. Entitled "The Asian Context of the Franco-Vietnamese War: Networks, Relations and Economy (1945-1954)"[6], he studies the Indochina War from a transnational perspective because, according to him, "one cannot understand the Franco-Vietnamese War (1945-1954) without placing it in a broader Asian context", thus developing an approach close to that of Denys Lombard (Le carrefour javanais).

He joined the History Department at UQÀM in 2004. He teaches there mainly on Asia and international relations.

His main research topics and courses are on :

Colonization and decolonization in Southeast Asia National identities in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam War and society: Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (1940-1998) International relations[7]

The transnational perspective he adopts in his studies of the Indochina War renews the historiography of this conflict. In his seminal work Vietnam, a state born out of the 1945-1954 war, published in 2011, he examines "the construction of the Vietnamese state apparatus by abandoning the warlike confrontation between colonized and colonizers" and the classical problematic between nationalism and communism.[8]

Since 1995, he has published and edited a dozen books. With Fredrik Logevall, he co-edits the collection "From Indochina to Vietnam: Revolution and War in a Global Perspective" at the California University Press in Berkeley.[9] In 2012, his Historical dictionary of the Indochina War (1945-1954): an international and interdisciplinary approach was included in the prestigious list of Outstanding Academic Titles 2012 compiled by the American magazine Choice[10]. This first thematic multidisciplinary dictionary on the Indochina War was then put online on the site of the Université du Québec à Montréal.

In his book Indochina or Vietnam? (Vendémiaire, 2015), he questions the concept of French Indochina by analyzing the relations between Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians and shows how Vietnamese expansionism was forged on the Indochinese colonial project.

Christopher E. Goscha is also an associate researcher at the Institut d'Asie Orientale in Lyon. He has written a history of modern and contemporary Vietnam for the Penguin publishing house[11]. He presented his new approach to the history of Vietnam at a conference at Cornell University on May 5, 2016 as part of the Voices on Vietnam exchange program[12]. An American edition of this book, entitled "Vietnam, a New History" is scheduled for August 2016.

• Falling Out of Touch. Une étude sur la politique communiste vietnamienne à l'égard d'un mouvement communiste cambodgien émergent, 1930-1975 = A Study of Vietnamese Communist Policy Towards an Emerging Cambodian Communist Movement, 1930-1975, Clayton, Victoria : Centre of Southeast Asian studies, Monash Asia Institute, Monash university, Monash Paper 35, 1995, with Thomas Engelberg.
• Vietnam or Indochina ? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, 1887-1954, Copenhague : Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1995.
• Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution (1885-1954), Richmond : Curzon Press, 1999.
• La guerre du Vietnam et l'Europe (1963-1973)= The Vietnam War and Europe (1963-1973), Bruxelles, Paris : Bruylant, L.G.D.J., 2003, under the guidance of Maurice Vaïsse.
• Contesting Visions of the Lao Past. Lao Historiography at the Crossroads, Copenhague, Londres : Nordic Institute of Asian Studies / Taylor & Francis, 2003, with Søren Ivarsson (eds).
• Le Viêt Nam depuis 1945 : naissance d'un Etat-Parti = Vietnam since 1945 : The birth of a Party-State, Paris : Les Indes Savantes, 2004, under the guidance of Benoît de Tréglodé.
• L'espace d'un regard : l'Asie de Paul Mus (1902-1969) = L'espace d'un regard: the Asia of Paul Mus (1902-1969), Paris : Les Indes Savantes, 2006, under the guidance of David Chandler.
• Connecting Histories. Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945-1962, Washington D.C., Stanford : Woodrow Wilson Center / Stanford University Press, 2009, under the guidance of Christian F. Ostermann.
• L'échec de la paix en Indochine, 1954-1962 = The failure of peace in Indochina, 1954-1962, Paris : Les Indes Savantes, 2010, with Karine Laplante (eds).
• Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War : An International and Interdisciplinary Approach (1945-1954), Honolulu, Copenhague : University of Hawaii Press / Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2011 and 2012.
• Vietnam, un Etat né de la guerre, 1945-1954 = Vietnam, a state born of war, 1945-1954, Paris : Armand Colin, 2011, translated from english by Agathe Larcher-Goscha.
• Going Indochinese : Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina, 1885-1945, Copenhague : Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, NIAS Classic series no. 3, 2012.
• Vietnam, de l'insurrection à la dictature (1920-2012) = Vietnam, from insurrection to dictatorship (1920-2012), Paris : Vendémiaire, coll. Essais, 2013, from the journal Communisme, 2013.
• The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam, Londres, Peguin Books, 2016.
• Vietnam, a New History, New York, Basic Books, 2016.

• "CHRIS GOSCHA -- A 'TOTAL' STATE OF WAR: THE CASE OF COMMUNIST VIETNAM". YouTube. 18 February 2014. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
• ""Towards a History of Modern Vietnam" featuring Professor Christopher Goscha". YouTube. 17 June 2016. Retrieved 30 October 2017.