Christopher Goscha


Christopher E. Goscha is an American-Canadian historian specializing in the history of the Cold War in Asia, decolonization, and the wars for Vietnam. He teaches the history of international relations, the Vietnam Wars, and World History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2019.

Biography

Christopher Goscha was born in 1965 in the United States. Since 2005, he lives and works in Canada where he is a Canadian citizen.
In 1987, he received his undergraduate degree at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., United States. In 1992, he obtained his Master's degree in Southeast Asian history at the Australian National University in Canberra.
He obtained a second Master's degree in 1994 in France at the Université de Paris VII.
He spent several years in Thailand and Vietnam where he studied Thai and Vietnamese.
In 2000, he defended his Phd at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His thesis, entitled "The Asian Context of the Franco-Vietnamese War: Networks, Relations and Economy ", examined the Indochina War from a transnational perspective.

Teaching and research

He joined the History Department at UQÀM in 2005 where he teaches the history of international relations, the Vietnam War, and World History.
His main research topics and courses focus on :

The Wars for Vietnam, The History of International Relations, the Cold War, World History, and comparative decolonization.
Since 1995, he has published and edited a dozen books. In 2012, his Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War : an International and Interdisciplinary Approach was included in the prestigious list of Outstanding Academic Titles 2012 compiled by the American magazine Choice.
This first thematic multidisciplinary dictionary on the Indochina War is now online at the Université du Québec à Montréal at
In his book Going Indochinese : Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina,. he questions the concept of French Indochina by analyzing the interactions among Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians and shows how a range of Vietnamese nationalists imagined the future of their nation in Indochinese terms..
He published in 2016, The Penguin History of Vietnam , Vietnam, A New History . This history of Vietnam was the winner of the 2017 John K. Fairbank Prize – American Historical Association, and finalist for the Cundhill History Prize.

Selected works