“It was the global perspective on history that attracted me, the chance to study international topics. For example: I did a tutorial about colonialism. In small groups we discussed books by main authors in the field. There was an author from India, from South America and from Europe also. That course helped me to realise that colonial society was very hybrid in a sense and not completely segregated. I learned the colonial authorities managed everything, even personal relationships. The course also helped me to realise that the colonial mindset has not completely disappeared at all.”
Love and romance during the Vietnam War
Pham’s thesis focused on how the North Vietnamese government regulated and represented love, sexual relationships and romance in the military during the Vietnam War. “I compared it with the way soldiers wrote about their experiences in war diaries. My conclusion was that many soldiers really aligned themselves with the ideals of the state because they believed that was the right thing to do. They had to forego all these personal emotions and relationships to focus on the war. But their diaries showed there were many moments when they had to fight back these individual thoughts and emotions and that is something we do not talk about as much as we should.”
Huygens Institute
Nowadays Pham is working at the Huygens Institute as a research assistant with the Globalise Project. “The project is focusing on digitizing the archives of the Dutch East India Company. The archives are in Dutch but my task in the project is to help with historically contextualizing all these entities mentioned in the archives. For example, they can mention a random place name in Asia, and you do not know what that means. We then create datasets to list all those entities and then I will provide information in the dataset about what it is and where this place is in the present day.”
Academic knowledge
“Before studying here and working on the Globalise Project I had no idea that the Dutch and the Vietnamese had a long history together since the 16th or 17th century. When working on the project, I read a book about how the Dutch East India Company had a trade settlement in Vietnam, how they negotiated with the Vietnamese kings and how the Vietnamese king’s took advantage of their military forces to fight their rivalries, which is so interesting. I had no idea how intertwined the military conflicts and all those political rivalries in Vietnam that I learnt in high school were. Let alone that I linked it to the network in the region and even world history.”
