Pierre Asselin

Pierre Asselin is Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State University. He is the author of A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), winner of the 2003 Kenneth W. Baldridge Prize; Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (University of California Press, 2013), winner of the 2013 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award; and Vietnam’s American War: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The latter, surveying the Vietnamese communist experience during the Vietnam War, has become a staple in both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses addressing the conflict. A second, extensively revised and updated edition was published by Cambridge in 2024. Asselin is editor of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, Volume III: Endings, forthcoming in February 2025. 

Other notable, recent peer-reviewed publications include “National Liberation by Other Means: US Visitor Diplomacy in the Vietnam War” in Past & Present (2024); “The Indochinese Communist Party’s Unfinished Revolution of 1945 and the Origins of Vietnam’s 30-Year Civil War” in Journal of Cold War Studies (2023); “French Decolonisation and Civil War: The Dynamics of Violence in the Early Phases of Anti-colonial War in Vietnam and Algeria, 1940-56” (with Martin Thomas) in Journal of Modern European History (2022); “Forgotten Front: The NLF in Hanoi’s Diplomatic Struggle, 1965-67” in Diplomatic History (2021); and “Global Revolutionary Currents, the Vietnamese Revolution, and the Origins of the American War” in African Identities (2018).

Asselin has been a guest on several podcasts, including American History Hit. He frequently appears on C-SPAN programming. His talk as part of C-SPAN’s Lectures in History series ranks among the most popular. Entitled “The Vietnam War, 1965-75,” it may be viewed at https://www.c-span.org/video/?442295-2/vietnam-war-1965-75.