Vincent P. Tran, a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley, has been selected to receive the 2026 Dr. Iris Hui Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship.
Established in 2021, this scholarship honors the vision and goals of Dr. Iris Hui, a PhD graduate of Political Science from UC Berkeley. Family and friends raised funding for this memorial scholarship in Dr. Hui’s name to support researchers and students tackling issues that meant so much to her — urgent, real-world problems facing all of us, including the governance of natural resources, climate change, political empowerment, and migration. As a former graduate student herself, Dr. Hui understood how funding like this can benefit graduate students.
Social Science Matrix is honored to be chosen as the institutional home for this memorial scholarship. Visit this page for more information about future opportunities to apply, and visit this page to read about past winners of the award.
About Vincent P. Tran
Vincent P. Tran studies Southeast Asian history, with a focus on modern Vietnam. His research interests include labor history, environmental history, and the history of technology, with particular attention to wartime construction and infrastructure. His work also engages with postwar transnational Vietnamese diaspora politics. Prior to pursuing his PhD, Vincent served as Organizing Director at a grassroots nonprofit in Southern California. Vincent holds a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley.
Abstract
Between 1962 and 1972, over 200,000 Vietnamese laborers were mobilized by RMK-BRJ, an American construction consortium, to undertake what the U.S. Navy characterized as the “largest military construction contract in history.” The escalation of the Vietnam War coincided with the rapid transformation of South Vietnam’s environmental landscape through the construction of ports, airfields, hospitals, supply depots, and thousands of miles of paved roads — many of which would later serve as foundations for postwar reconstruction. Despite this significance, there has been little scholarship examining the social and environmental impacts of this construction on South Vietnam.
This project addresses this gap by examining how wartime construction transformed the environmental landscape and became entangled with labor mobilization, the wartime economy, and civil engineering expertise. Drawing on Vietnamese-language archival sources, this project centers Vietnamese laborers and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) government as historical actors and aims to answer three sets of questions. First, how did Vietnamese laborers, labor unions, and the RVN government navigate, negotiate, and challenge American construction operations? Second, how did the confluence of construction projects reshape national and local economies in South Vietnam? Third, how did American civil engineering expertise encounter and clash with local environments and building techniques?
