Patricia Pelley
Email: Patricia.Pelley@ttu.edu
Office: 140 Holden Hall
Ph.D., Cornell University
Patricia Pelley is the prize-winning author of Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Duke UP, 2002). In this book she explores the ways in which Vietnamese scholars re-interpreted the history of Vietnam in the period after 1954. Following the publication of this book, she received a number of awards: the First Book Prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (co-recipient), Texas Tech University President’s book award, and Texas Tech University Chancellor's Research Award. Pelley has also written numerous articles and reviews on a wide range of topics. Currently she is working on a new book-length manuscript, “The Case of Marcel Văn (1928-1959).” This book explores the intersection of Vietnamese revolutionary, French colonial, Catholic, and Cold War histories by focusing on the life and death of Thầy Nguyễn Tân Văn, a mystic whose works are well known by Catholics throughout the world but remain virtually unknown in Vietnam. She conducts her research in archives and libraries in Vietnam, principally, but also in France.
Patricia Pelley teaches a variety of graduate classes in world history, including Topics in Asian History (5352) and Readings in World History (6307). She also teaches several undergraduate classes: World History to 1500 (2322), Modern Japan (4394), Modern Vietnam (4395), and History 4398, the capstone course for history majors. In recent semesters her section of this course has focused on the theme of cross-cultural confrontations in world history.
Published Works
Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past
New nations require new histories of their struggles for nationhood. Postcolonial
Vietnam takes us back to the 1950s to see how official Vietnamese historians and others
rethought what counted as history, what producing history entailed, and who should
be included as participants and agents in the story. Beginning with government-appointed
historians’ first publications in 1954 and following their efforts over the next thirty
years, Patricia M. Pelley surveys this daunting process and, in doing so, opens a
wide window on the historical forces and tensions that have gone into shaping the
new nation of Vietnam.
Although she considers a variety of sources—government directives, census reports, statistics, poetry, civic festivities, ethnographies, and museum displays—Pelley focuses primarily on the work of official historians in Hanoi who argued about and tried to stabilize the meaning of topics ranging from prehistory to the Vietnam War. She looks at their strained and idiosyncratic attempts to plot the Vietnamese past according to Marxist and Stalinist paradigms and their ultimate abandonment of such models. She explores their struggle to redefine Vietnam in multiethnic terms and to normalize the idea of the family-state. Centering on the conversation that began in 1954 among historians in North Vietnam, her work identifies a threefold process of creating the new history: constituting historiographical issues, resolving problems of interpretation and narration, and conventionalizing various elements of the national narrative. As she tracks the processes that shaped the history of postcolonial Vietnam, Pelley dismantles numerous clichés of contemporary Vietnamese history and helps us to understand why and how its history-writing evolved.
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