History graduate students receive nationally competitive grants

Zachary Tayler, a third-year Ph.D. candidate studying American military history under supervisor Ingo Trauschweizer, was awarded the Michael J. Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His dissertation, “Reconciliation and Normalization: The United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 1975-1995,” provides a comprehensive overview of the relations between Washington and Hanoi.

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The dissertation analyzes these relations during the twenty-year periods between the end of the Vietnam War and the normalization of diplomatic relations between those two countries. The $4,000 Hogan grant will support Tayler’s enrollment in the University of Wisconsin’s Intermediate Vietnamese II course this spring, with the goal of acquiring required competency in the language for a future research trip to Vietnam.

“The success and vitality of my academic career are inherently connected to my ability to read and speak the Vietnamese language,” Tayler said. “The next semester is crucial because it will serve as a stepping-stone to allow me to enroll in Advanced Vietnamese I and II the upcoming summer, so receiving this grant is a major help.”

Cody Billock, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate studying Vietnamese history under supervisor Alec Holcombe, was awarded a $1,000 Russell F. Weigley Graduate Student Travel Grant from the Society for Military History to travel to the 2025 Society for Military History Conference in Mobile, Alabama. 

Billock will present a paper – "The Việt Cộng’s Total War: Communist Mass Mobilization in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War" – which is a piece of his larger dissertation that focuses on the central Vietnamese city of Huế as a case study to examine the complexity and fragmentation of Vietnamese political life during the Vietnamese Civil War (1945-1975).

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“The success of the Vietnamese Communists, or Việt Cộng, in the Vietnam War (1959-1975) is often attributed to their ability to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people. Earlier scholarship portrayed the Southern insurgency as a spontaneous movement arising from economic discontent over unequal land distribution,” Billock said of his planned presentation. 

“This narrative, depicting the Việt Cộng as simple peasants fighting for independence, overlooks the crucial role of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP)," Billock said. "I will utilize newly available documents from the Central Office of the South (COSVN) to reveal that they employed mass mobilization policies to marshal every aspect of 'liberated' areas. These mass mobilization policies amounted to a strategy of 'total war' and were critical to the Party’s ultimate military triumph in South Vietnam.”

Tayler and Billock are both also certificate-seeking students in Ohio University’s Contemporary History Institute, and have also been awarded CHI grants for their projects.