Research Interests

Educated in the Soviet Union, Israel, and the United States, Olga Dror is currently a professor of history at Texas A&M University. She has authored, translated, and co-edited five books and numerous articles. The focus of her research ranges from Vietnamese and Chinese theistic religions and European missionaries in Asia in early modern times to the study of the civilian experience during the Tet Offensive in Hue, to North and South Vietnamese youth during the Second Indochina War to political religions. Her most recent monograph Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975 was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. Her articles have appeared in the leading journals of several fields Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Social History, Journal of Cold War Studies. Among her awards are a National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, a Henry Luce National Humanities Center Fellowship, a fellowship of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes, France, and a Dan David International Fellowship. She is currently working on a monograph titled Ho Chi Minh’s Cult in Vietnamese Statehood, where, among other things, she focuses on the examination of Ho Chi Minh’s cult in the construction and maintaining the Vietnamese state. She also will bring in a comparison of Ho Chi Minh’s cults to the cults of other communist leaders.