Charles Waugh, visiting assistant professor in Utah State University’s department of English, is taking his second extended trip to Vietnam, this time on a Fulbright Award.

Waugh, whose academic interests include both the critical and the creative, divides his time between writing fiction and studying issues of American culture and the environment.

“I will teach ‘A Literary, Historical, and Environmental Introduction to the United States’ for the Faculty of International Studies at Vietnam National University,” Waugh said.

The course is an expansion of a course Waugh developed for the Utah State English department, “American Culture and Environment,” which investigates the close relationships among American culture, the politics of expansion and perceptions of nature. In addition to his teaching responsibilities in Hanoi, Waugh will help Vietnamese professors develop an American Studies program there.

“As a master’s candidate in history at the University of Oregon, I researched the cultural impact of American public administration advisors in South Vietnam in the 1950s,” said Waugh.  “I studied the Vietnamese language, which helped me begin to understand the culture, and after finishing my degree in 1996, I had an opportunity to be a part of the University of Oregon Vietnam National University Sister University Project. As one part of the project, I worked for a business newspaper in Hanoi and got to see how all that nation-building rhetoric of the ‘50s has been recycled into the present day rhetoric of development.”

Waugh went on to earn his doctorate from the University of Denver where he studied fiction writing, American literature and critical theory. He’s written about the role of bear killing in American literature and culture, and about Melville as a critic of globalization, in addition to many short stories and a novel.

“While in Hanoi I plan to study Vietnamese attitudes toward the environment, write about living and traveling in Vietnam and continue work on a collection of short stories about expatriate life in Hanoi,” Waugh said.

In addition, Waugh said he’ll be doing research in the Vietnamese National Archives for several future book projects.

For more information on Waugh or the department of English at Utah State, call (435) 797-3858.