browse tags

Christopher Goscha

Portrait of Christopher   Goscha

Christopher Goscha is a Canadian historian specializing in the history of the Cold War in Asia as well as colonization and decolonization in the Afro-Asian world, and a professor of international relations, the Vietnam Wars, and World History at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) since 2005. 

He studied at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, USA(BA), the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (MA), the University Diderot Paris VII (MA) and École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). His PhD Thesis at EPHE in November 2000 was titled ​“Le contexte asiatique de la guerre franco-vietnamienne : réseaux, relations et économie (d’août 1945 à mai 1954)” [The Asian Context to the French-Vietnamese War: Networks, relations and economics from August 1945 to May 1954]. 

“As strange as it might sound, I always wanted to write a dictionary”, allowed Christopher Goscha in a 2016 conference at Cornell University, ​“Towards a History of Modern Vietnam”; ​“I hadn’t any political axe to grind when I worked on my Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945−1954), it was just a confluence of hypotheses on the way ​“instant history” can be built.”

Selected Publications

  • [PhD thesis] Le contexte asiatique de la guerre franco-vietnamienne : réseaux, relations et économie (d’août 1945 à mai 1954) [The Asian Context to the French-Vietnamese War: Networks, relations and economics from August 1945 to May 1954], Paris, EPHE, 2000, 816 p.
  • [with David P. Chandler] L’espace d’un regard : Paul Mus et l’Asie (1902−1969), 2006.
  • Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945−1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach, University of Hawa’ii Press, 2011, 601 p.
  • Vietnam, un État né de la guerre, Paris, Armand Colin, 2011.
  • Going Indochinese : Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina, University of Hawa’ii Press, 2012.
  • “La guerre indirecte franco-américaine au Vietnam (1948−1963)”, Revue Historique des Armées 276, 3d quarter 2014: 44 – 56.
  • “Bao Dai et Sihanouk: la fabrique indochinoise des rois coloniaux”, in La colonisation des corps, François Guillemot & Agathe Larcher-Goscha (eds.), Paris, Vendémiaire, 2014 : 127 – 175.
  • The Penguin History of Vietnam, Penguin/​Random House, 2016.
  • “1er septembre 1966, le discours de Phnom Penh”, in L’Histoire de France vue d’ailleurs, Jean-Noël Jeanneney & Jeanne Guérout (eds.), Paris, Les Arènes, 2016: 556 – 569.
  • Vietnam, A New History, Basic Books, 2016 [American edition of The Penguin History of Vietnam, 2017 John K. Fairbank Prize – American Historical Association. The book has been barred from import to Vietnam].
  • “Colonial monarchy and decolonisation in the French Empire: Bao Dai, Norodom Sihanouk and Mohammed V”, Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia, Robert Aldrich ed., Manchester University Press, June 2020: 152 – 174.
  • The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam, Princeton University Press, 2022. 

see a list of Christopher Goscha’s publications available online.