Jonathan Brunstedt wins Summer NEH
Jonathan Brunstedt has won an NEH Summer Stipend Fellowship for his second book project on the entangled cultural representation of the U.S.-Vietnam (1961-1975) and the Soviet-Afghan (1979-1989) wars!
This is a highly competitive fellowship supporting full-time work for two months. Jonathan will use this fellowship to study how both wars as historical analogies shaped political identity. Jonathan pursues the social, political, and cultural ramifications of this analogizing on both sides of the Iron Curtain, finding a transnational “Soviet Vietnam” narrative throughout the 1980s. This seemingly irresistible historical parallel provided a framework for Americans and Soviet Russians to negotiate both the meaning of these two conflicts and their countries’ place in the world, hastening the USSR’s collapse and fueling the revival of an American exceptionalism that outlived the Cold War.