Join us Tuesday for a guest lecture with Dr. Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, of The Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University.

More than half a century after the end of the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of people—Vietnamese and American alike—remain missing, unaccounted for, and unmourned. For their families, the war never truly ended. This talk asks a fundamental but rarely confronted question: how did North Vietnam sustain a war of such extraordinary human cost, and what does that mobilization mean for the lives that were lost and never properly accounted for?

Drawing on his scholarship on North Vietnam’s land reform and his current work leading the Vietnam Wartime Accounting Initiative (VWAI) at Texas Tech University, Alex-Thái Đình Võ traces how radical social transformation enabled total war—mobilizing millions of people, extracting labor and resources, and sustaining decades of conflict. He then follows the human consequences of that mobilization: mass death, mass disappearance, and generations of families left without answers.

The talk bridges history and humanitarian inquiry, showing how millions of pages of captured wartime documents now serve a new purpose—not as instruments of war, but as tools of repair. By reconstructing forgotten lives and tracing the missing, this project reimagines the archive as a site of reconciliation.

This lecture invites scholars, students, and the public to reflect on the unfinished human reckoning of the Vietnam War—and why accounting for the dead still matters today.

Sponsored by the Department of History, Department of International Affairs, and the Center for Asian Studies.