Dao Duy Anh (1904-1988), Vietnamese Intellectual: A Biography

FAIN: FA-252304-17

Haydon Leslie Cherry
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

Researching and writing of a biography of Dao Duy Anh (1904-1988), a leading Vietnamese intellectual, teacher, and journalist.

My project is an intellectual biography of Dao Duy Anh (1904-1988), arguably the most important Vietnamese scholar and intellectual of the twentieth century. Dao Duy Anh was a pioneering journalist, lexicographer, historian, and literary scholar. He had a profound effect on the modern Vietnamese language, the writing of history in Vietnam, institutions of higher education and research, and the training of an entire generation of Vietnamese humanistic scholars and academicians. Dao Duy Anh always had a fraught relationship with the state: the French colonial state arrested him for radical political activism and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam sent him into exile for political dissidence. My project traces the development of Dao Duy Anh’s extraordinary scholarly career and the challenges of intellectual production in twentieth-century Vietnam.