Update Jan 27, 2016: I’ve reviewed the dissertation for the website Dissertation Reviews.
On New Year’s Eve, I finished reading a terrific dissertation about Vietnamese in the former Czechoslovakia. The author is Alena Alamgir (Rutgers 2014), and her work is about a bilateral labor program between the DRV and Czechoslovakia from 1967 to 1989 that sent Vietnamese from the European country for training and work in a variety of industries. The field is historical sociology – it won the Theda Skocpol Award from the American Sociological Association last year – and the dissertation utilizes a good deal of documents from the National Czech Archives, including materials from three governmental agencies in the Cold War era.