Biographies

Robert Brigham

Robert Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, joined the Vassar faculty in 1994. He is a specialist on the history of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War. Along with several teaching awards, he has also earned fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Brigham is author or co-author of nine books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War (PublicAffairs, 2018); American Foreign Relations: A History, Volume I & Volume II, 8th Edition [along with Thomas Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, Michael Donoghue, and Kenneth Hagan] (Cengage, 2015); Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power (PublicAffairs, 2008); Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (PublicAffairs, 2006); ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Kansas, 2006); Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (PublicAffairs, 1999), written with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight of Brown University; and Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Cornell, 1998).

Kenneth Hoffman

Kenneth Hoffman is a Professor of Communication at Seton Hall University where he teaches courses in digital photography, computer graphics, and multimedia. He holds the MFA in film production and the PhD in communication from New York University. While stationed in Vietnam in 1970 as a first lieutenant, he personally took over 1,500 images focusing on various aspects of the culture and the impact of the social and economic turmoil of the war on the people of Vietnam. He says that he “was struck most by their inner dignity, a dignity seemingly stamped into the very structure of their faces, especially in the vivid faces of the children.” His book Vietnam War Dialogues is based on over 5,000 responses to his blog, which was active from 1996-2004, and includes about 70 of his Vietnam photos. The book (pdf below) is included in a 2017 exhibition at the SoHo Photo Gallery titled “Off the Wall.” A selection of those photos illustrate this website.