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Vassar College

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Faculty

Robert. K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, has taught at Vassar College since 1994. He teaches courses on the history of American foreign relations, human rights, the Vietnam War, and negotiations to end deadly conflict. Along with several teaching awards, Brigham has also earned fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, the Cooper Foundation, the Gilman Foundation, and the Social Sciences Committee in Hanoi, Vietnam. In addition, Brigham has been Albert Shaw Endowed Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Mellon Senior Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (Clare College), visiting professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, summer seminar faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History (Fulbright) at University College Dublin. Currently, Brigham is also a Visiting Professor at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin.

Brigham is author of several books and essays on American foreign relations, including Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Cornell, 1998); Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy, written with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight of Brown University (PublicAffairs, 1999); ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Kansas, 2006); Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (PublicAffairs, 2006); Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power (PublicAffairs, 2008); America and Iraq since 1990 (Wiley/Blackwell, 2012); The Global Ho Chi Minh (Potomac, 2013); and The Wars for Vietnam, written with Mark Bradley and Lien-Hang Nguyen (Wiley/Blackwell, forthcoming). Brigham recently joined Tom Paterson’s textbook team (along with J. Garry Clifford, Michael Donoghue, and Kenneth Hagan) for American Foreign Relations: A History, Volume I & Volume II, 8th Edition (Boston: Wadsworth/Cenage, 2015). He is currently at work on a monograph of the Clinton Administration’s search for a new liberal world order following the cold war (Cambridge University Press).

Brigham has served on the editorial advisory board of Passport and Diplomatic History, the scholarly journals of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and Eyes on the I.C.C, the only scholarly journal devoted to the study of the International Criminal Court. Brigham has also been the special guest editor of the Organization of American Historians’ Magazine of History.

A regular public lecturer, Brigham has provided interviews and written some two hundred articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The Bangkok Post, Deutsche Welle (Germany), El Mercurio (Chile), Vietnam News, The Standard (Hong Kong), South China Morning Post, Asia Times, and The Independent (London). He has also appeared on National Public Radio, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the British Broadcasting Company, CBS Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Company, Talk Radio (Dublin); RTE (Ireland); NHK (Japan), and CNN. In 2009, the United Nations named Brigham one of its "Global Experts on International Relations."