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Edward Miller: Toward an International History
of U.S. Foreign Relations
by Lisa Yu Ding ‘08
 Professor Edward Miller
joined the Dartmouth History Department as an assistant professor in the fall
of 2004. Since then, he has taught a medley of American history courses,
including U.S. History since 1865, U.S. Foreign Policy to 1900, U.S. Foreign
Policy since 1900, and the Vietnam War. He has also been teaching a popular
upper-class seminar entitled “Empires, Imperialism, and the United States.”
Though he grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, the home of Michigan State
University, Professor Miller did not decide to become a scholar until he had
left the academic world for a period of time. Having majored in History at
Swarthmore College, Professor Miller spent a few years working at an
English-language radio station in Taiwan. While in Taiwan, he began to reflect
back on the classes he had taken at Swarthmore on U.S. foreign relations and
the problem with those classes: “There was a focus on the American side
of issues but little on the foreign side, where there is a whole other
dimension to explore.”
Accepted into the doctoral program in History at Harvard, Professor Miller
settled on the subject of the Vietnam War for his dissertation, partly because
an undergraduate course he had taken on the conflict had engaged his curiosity.
More importantly, during the mid-1990s, South Vietnamese sources that had
previously been unavailable to the public finally became accessible, providing
the perfect foundation for his research.
In 2001-02, Professor Miller went to Vietnam and Singapore on a Fulbright
Fellowship to conduct research for his dissertation. Prior to taking his
position at Dartmouth, he already had some teaching experience under his belt.
While a graduate student at Harvard, Professor Miller served as a teaching
fellow, which gave him the opportunity not only to lecture and lead discussion
sections, but also to advise students on their senior Honors theses. He also
taught a course on the Vietnam War at Bentley College.
Presently Professor Miller is finishing his first book, Grand Designs:
The Making and Unmaking of America's Alliance with Ngo Dinh Diem,
1954-1963. “In this book, I reinterpret the origins of the U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War by analyzing Washington's relationship with Ngo
Dinh Diem, the founding leader of South Vietnam. I refute the conventional view
of Diem as a U.S. puppet and instead portray him as a modernizer who pursued
his own vision for South Vietnam. This created friction in his relations with
the United States and led eventually to his downfall in an American-backed coup
in 1963—an event which led to deeper U.S. involvement in the war.”
When asked about his philosophy on research and teaching, Professor Miller
explained, “The relationship between teaching and research, which are often
seen as separate, is that they are fundamentally related. Teaching forces
scholars to take their research and make it connect to the interests of a
broader audience.”
Professor Miller believes that teaching and talking with his students has
helped his research and writing. “If we don’t teach our research, we fall into
a net where we are only talking to four or five others in our specialized
field. Teaching helps us to figure out the broader significance of our
research.”
Reflecting on his past two years at Dartmouth, Professor Miller had much
praise for both his fellow faculty members and the students he has encountered.
“The History Department is a great place to work because I have colleagues who
are very serious about history but don’t take themselves too seriously.” He
also noted that the History Department is particularly congenial to junior
faculty because senior members are very supportive, offering junior colleagues
assistance and encouragement in their teaching as well as in their
research.
Professor Miller added: “I think the students here are great. As a group,
they are really serious about learning in an active way, and not just coming to
class to record information. They are not just learning history; they are doing
history, doing their own research. Overall, I’m very impressed with Dartmouth
students.”
In August, Professor Miller has an article due out in the inaugural issue of
the Journal of Vietnamese Studies in which he examines how scholars
have thought about the history of the Vietnam War. He argues that historians of
the conflict have tended to overemphasize the Cold War. Instead, Professor
Miller proposes conceptualizing the Vietnam War as a struggle and contest among
competing visions of modernization.
This summer, Professor Miller will be in Vietnam on an NEH grant to complete
the research for his book. He will be investigating South Vietnamese government
records held in Ho Chi Minh City.
Jean Kim: Exploring Human Difference and
Health
Lisa Yu Ding ’08 posed the following questions to Jean Kim,
who joined the History Department in 2005:
Q.: Tell me about your background: where you were
born, grew up, attended school, received your degrees. What are your fields of
interest? Where do these interests come from?
 Professor
Kim: I was born in Queens, New York, and attended schools in
Seoul, Korea, North Carolina, Texas, and New York. I have degrees in
History, Psychology, and Social Work.
As an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, I was broadly interested in the way
modern societies create categories of human difference that can literally have
life-and-death consequences. I took a broad range of history courses, and
I also completed the full complement of courses for a psychology major and
planned to go into social work. I went on to follow a clinical
concentration in mental health and chemical dependency in graduate
school. I completed my practicum in casework with populations living with
AIDS. That work suited me, but was tremendously challenging for someone
who was then in her early twenties.
Before I went on to graduate school, some of my history professors and
teaching assistants tried recruiting me into their field. I never
fathomed a career as an academic, but I enjoyed studying history, and I started
considering what it might be like as a profession. I finished my B.A. in
three years and hadn’t given myself a good chance to think beyond the narrow
goal I had decided upon as a freshman. I had nothing to lose by applying
to programs in history and was accepted into the program at Cornell in
1997. History is a great field because it can accommodate virtually any
interest one has. I’ve maintained the same interests in my work, but have
now changed fields.
Q.: What other jobs have you held? How did they
help you prepare for this job?
Professor Kim: I had my first job as a teaching
assistant back in 1996. It was for a graduate policy-research class at
the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, I’ve followed the typical
trajectory of working as a teaching assistant at Cornell and as a visiting
instructor at Amherst College and at Swarthmore. Those have all been
great experiences, but adjusting to a new school is still hard work because
academic cultures can be significantly different across institutions.
Q.: Please describe your research.
Professor Kim: My first project combines my interest
in the way social meanings are attached to human difference and expands that
into an analysis of how these meanings manifest themselves epidemiologically
and in the kinds of health regimens available to certain people. I am
also interested in how narratives of health and healing generate and either
reinforce or challenge existing social hierarchies. This project focuses
on health services available to people living on sugar plantations in Hawai’i
during much of the islands’ territorial period. My second project will be
on the history of clinical psychology and, in particular, on the conception,
uses, and statistical normalization of an intelligence-testing instrument that
was validated through wide application on various sub-populations residing in
Hawai’i before World War II. From Hawai’i, the testing instrument as well
as its administrators moved all over the world. I explore how the
international circulation of this intelligence-testing device informed the
institutionalization of the field of clinical psychology, established clinical
ideas about discrete human developmental categories such as childhood, and,
lastly, influenced the shape of institutions such as reform schools,
psychiatric hospitals, and prisons across three colonial contexts:
Hawai’i, Australia, and South Africa.
Q.: What classes do you teach?
Professor Kim: Next year I am offering two new
courses and one that I have restructured. In a course I am offering
through the Writing Program, we will examine histories of normative ideas about
human physicality. These ideas are informed by philosophy, religion,
politics, and science; and they also have significant consequences for the
structure of social relations, policymaking, and medicine. The second new
course follows case studies of various epidemics. We will explore how
societies have responded to infectious disease outbreaks and the consequences
and conditions of possibility of these responses—both in pragmatic and
ideological terms. Lastly, I have changed the periodization of a two-part
Asian American history survey. I will offer the first installment
covering various Asian migrations to Hawai’i, North America, the Caribbean, and
Latin America through 1905 in the spring quarter. History 2 is a course I
will likely offer annually.
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