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Dr. Patrick Hagopian

Senior Lecturer

Degree: Ph.D (History), Johns Hopkins University; M.A. (Communications), University of Pennsylvania; B.A. (American Studies), University of Sussex

Associated research centres and groups: American Studies, Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Dynamics of Memories

Current Teaching

HIST 256: The United States and the Vietnam War

HIST 257: After Vietnam: Remembering, Representing, and Refighting the 'Bad War'

HIST 366: The Politics of Memory: The Contested Past in Museums, Monuments, and Minds

Research Interests

Patrick Hagopian's research interests are in American memory: the representation of the past in museums and public monuments, popular expressions of the past in oral histories, and the intersection between individual memory and communal representations of the past. His current research project is a monograph on the "jurisdictional gap" that conferred immunity from prosecution on U.S. military veterans for crimes they committed while in military service outside the United States.

His book titled The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing was published by the University of Massachusetts Press (2009). The book was a Choice "outstanding academic title" for 2009 and was an honorable mention in the 2010 American Studies Network Book Prize awarded by the European Association for American Studies.

"Hagopian . . . offers a particularly telling critique of the 'apolitical' healing and reconciliation themes associated with the [Vietnam Veterans M]emorial, arguing cogently that this result was achieved at the cost of avoiding, forgetting, or covering up many of the most important aspects of the war . . . . This is among the most important books on the Vietnam War published in the last decade." Choice, December 2009.

"Patrick Hagopian has written a wonderful book. . . . The research in Hagopian's study is wide-ranging and impressive, and a number of the issues he examines, such as his analysis of the much-under-studied Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program, clearly sets his book apart from other excellent works on postwar memory and commemoration." The Public Historian, February 2010.

"Combining history, cultural analysis and heritage studies, this erudite analysis is steeped in thorough primary source research. In particular, we were impressed with the way the author dissects historical representations of the past as part and parcel of efforts to perpetuate historical amnesia." American Studies Network Book Prize committee, March 2010.

Hagopian's research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Historical Association, the US Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board. His other publications include "The 'Lessons' of the Vietnam War" in Max Friedman and Padraig Kenney, Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (Palgrave, 2005); "Vietnam War Photography as Locus of Memory," in Annette Kuhn and Kirsten McAllister, Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (Berghahn Books, 2006); "Interchange: Legacies of the Vietnam War" (co-author), Journal of American History Vol. 93, no. 2 (September 2006); "The Abu Ghraib Photographs and the State of America: Defining Images" in Louise Purbrick, Jim Aulich and Graham Dawson, ed., Contested Spaces: Sites, Representations and Histories of Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and "The 'Frustrated Hawks,' Tet 1968, and the Transformation of American Politics," European Journal of American Studies (2008) special issue on May 1968, [http://ejas.revues.org/document7193.html].

His current projects include articles in progress on the Korean War Veterans Memorial; the United States and the laws of war from Toth v. Quarles (1955) to the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act; and counterinsurgency and the lessons of the Vietnam War. His next monograph is a project on oral narratives of the Vietnam War, contracted for publication with the University of Massachusetts Press.

He particularly welcomes applications from research students interested in the Vietnam War; politics, conflict, and memory; and public representations of the international history of race and slavery.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Critical Studies of Museums, Cultural and Social Memory; Twentieth-Century Cultural Politics;Cold War and Post-Cold War Military Discourses; Representations of the History of Race and Slavery

Career details

After obtaining his BA in American Studies at Sussex University, Hagopian did his post-graduate work in the United States, where he studied Communications (MA, Pennsylvania) and History (PhD, Johns Hopkins). He then took up a postdoctoral fellowship in American Material Culture at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, before returning to teach American Studies in Britain.

Associated Keywords: American studies, Cultural Studies, Culture, Culture and media, Discourse, Gender, History, Media, Memorials, Memory, Museums, Oral testimony, Politics, United States, Vietnam War

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