Lien-Hang Nguyen, the Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia at Columbia University, will deliver the Third Annual Judith Ladinsky Lecture at the University of Wisconsin – Madison on Friday, October 20, 2017.
Professor Nguyen’s lecture is titled “Rethinking the Tet Offensive Fifty Years Later.” Although the Tet Offensive represented a major turning point in the Vietnam War, much of North Vietnam’s decision making surrounding the offensive remains unclear even fifty years later. Based on recently-declassified materials and publications from Vietnam, Professor Nguyen’s talk reveals how North Vietnamese domestic politics and foreign relations influenced Hanoi’s strategy deliberation for the 1968 offensive.
The Judith Ladinsky Lecture is named for Judith Ladinsky (1938-2012), who was a professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences in the University of Wisconsin Medical School for over 30 years and was the Director of the Office of International Health. She held affiliation with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In the early 1970s, Ladinsky changed her career focus to preventive medicine on a community level linking rural clinics to centralized specialty care. She began this work in rural Wisconsin, progressing to the Indian Health Service, and finally to Southesast Asia, particulary Vietnam.
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