Faculty
Desaix Anderson '58 was a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service in Asia for thirty-five years, with posts in Nepal, Vietnam, China, Japan, and Thailand. He spent many years In Vietnam, beginning with studying the language in 1964. From 1965 to 1967, he was stationed in Saigon as a USAID representative. In 1973, he returned to Vietnam with forty other foreign-service officers to analyze the military, political, economic, and psychological consequences of the withdrawal of U.S. forces on a town in the Mekong Delta. When President Clinton established diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995, Anderson was dispatched to Hanoi to open the U.S. Embassy as chargé d'affaires. During his tenure, Anderson launched a new, constructive relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam, which continues to this day. In his book An American in Hanoi: Reconciliation between America and Vietnam (2002), Mr. Anderson reflects on his experiences in Vietnam during that time.
Anderson has lectured at Princeton University on East Asian political economies, including Vietnam's, and on Asian security issues in graduate and undergraduate courses, and has led task forces on Northeast Asian security issues, all in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He currently serves on the Advisory Council of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). The creator of the Hanoi Global Seminar, he lead the seminar in 2007 and 2008 and will continue to serve as its faculty director in 2009.
David Leheny is the Henry Wendt III '55 Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Most of Leheny's diverse research projects involve Japan's reaction to and adoption of international norms, or standards of behavior that have prescriptive and constitutive effects on state action. He is the author of two books Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety and The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure. Leheny is co-editor of the manuscript Inescapable Solutions: Japanese Aid and the Construction of Global Development which draws on anthropological, sociological, and political theories of development to engage recent debates about Japanese aid policy. Among its chapters is an analysis of Japanese aid to Vietnam. Leheny has begun a comparative research project on Japanese and Vietnamese images of China and the United States.
Christophe Robert received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University in 2005, with research fellowship support from Fulbright-Hays, the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He then taught at Princeton University and at the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale. Since 1998 he has worked on urban planning and resettlement, migration, poverty reduction and HIV/AIDS with Save the Children-UK and ENDA, and other international and Vietnamese organizations in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. He now lives in Hong Kong and works as a consultant in China and Vietnam. His research focuses on the aftermath of war and state violence, and their effects on governance in urban areas throughout Vietnam and Southeast Asia.