Simon Toner

U.S. foreign relations; Vietnam; Cold War East and Southeast Asia; global development

Simon Toner is a historian of the United States and the World, focusing particularly on the history of the American War in Vietnam and U.S. development projects in Cold War East and Southeast Asia. He is currently completing a book manuscript, based primarily on Vietnamese and American archival sources, which explores the final years of the American War in Vietnam as an episode in the history of global development. In particular, it shows how changes in global development thinking and practice in the late 1960s and 1970s shaped debates between and within the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments and had a decisive impact on the course and outcome of the war.

Simon is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Sheffield (on leave 2016-2017). He completed his PhD in International History at the London School of Economics in 2015. In the 2015-2016 academic year he was a U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. He has received funding from the Society for Historians of U.S. Foreign Relations, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the LBJ Foundation.