Southeast Asia Spotlight - 9/18/2026 - Vietnam Studies Program

A bowl of phở is an unexpectedly good place to begin thinking about Harvard’s new Vietnam Studies Program (VSP). “It’s the quintessential Vietnamese dish. But how much of it is French, how much of it is Chinese, indigenous Vietnamese?” asks HMS Assistant Professor David Duong, the program’s founding Director. He is interested, too, in the economics of the dish – “What percentage of Vietnam’s GDP does pho contribute to?” – and in the complex questions of national identity, colonialism, and globalisation that a bite might reveal. 

Based at the Harvard University Asia Center’s Southeast Asia Initiative, VSP is soft-launching this fall, ahead of a formal launch planned for March 2027. It builds on Vietnamese language instruction, one of the world’s largest Vietnamese-language library collections and faculty expertise already present at Harvard – with the ambition to give those resources a shared institutional home. It aims to bring together faculty and students who care about Vietnam, but who might otherwise exist in separate corners of Harvard’s sprawling schools. Duong hopes to give the University more ways to get to know the country: through its cities and villages, its food and history, and most importantly, through building and strengthening connections with the people who live there.  

What might an interdisciplinary program make possible? Duong gives the example of the health of garment factory workers. Duong is also a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Through his clinical lens, he is keenly aware of how a health phenomenon can spill beyond medicine. Understanding garment workers means considering not only occupational injuries or respiratory illnesses, but also the pressures of living away from family leading to mental health issues, the economic incentives of employers to protect the health of their workers, and the policies governing access to healthcare and safety standards. 

For VSP, this is where bringing Harvard’s schools together becomes useful. Public health researchers might examine occupational hazards, while business scholars ask what would persuade employers to invest in workers’ wellbeing, and social scientists could investigate the complexities of life as a garment worker. Duong hopes that the VSP will help them find each other – and collaborators in Vietnam. It will begin by offering seed funding for interdisciplinary projects, as well as travel support and connections to local institutions, data, and documents.

For students, the program’s promise is more immediate: a way to turn curiosity into an opportunity to go. Duong’s own connection to Vietnam began taking shape as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where travel grants and faculty mentors helped him research the country’s healthcare system by living there himself. He continued that work as a Harvard medical student, eventually expanding from HIV/AIDS programming into medical education and primary health care.

The new program hopes to offer similar starting points through student travel grants, mentored research and summer internships. A pilot “Hanoi Hub”, through a collaboration with the Harvard Global Health Institute, has brought eight Harvard undergraduates, alongside graduate students, to work with organizations in Hanoi on socioeconomic and health-related issues. On campus, the program plans a faculty-student roundtable this fall and hopes to pilot an interdisciplinary course in 2027. Longer-term teaching proposals include a survey course, provisionally called “Vietnam in the World,” advanced seminars and thesis support.

These opportunities are meant to run in both directions. Duong envisions pathways for Vietnamese academics to spend time at Harvard as visiting scholars or postdoctoral fellows, and research developed jointly by Vietnamese and Harvard collaborators. Eventually, he hopes the initiative could grow into a center or institute, with enough courses for students to pursue a certificate or perhaps a secondary field.

Asked what success for VSP might look like in five or ten years, Duong pauses — a rarity in an otherwise free-flowing conversation. He hopes for VSP to become a Center or Institute, interdisciplinary grants and research produced jointly with Vietnamese institutions. But he also imagines a call from a former student, perhaps living in Vietnam or pursuing a PhD in Vietnamese studies. He imagines someone saying: “The program gave me this initial travel grant…this initial seed funding… and it’s really helped pave the way for me.”

To learn more about the Vietnam Studies Program (VSP), please visit https://asiacenter.harvard.edu/southeast-asia-initiative/vietnam-studies-program; to sign up for the VSP mailing list, please visit https://mailchi.mp/harvard/vsp.