Individual Listing

HUMANITIES SOCSCI
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Biggs, David A

Assistant Professor of History

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

History


Biography

Growing up in the coastal plains of the Lower Cape Fear in North Carolina, David Biggs traded his childhood pastimes of fishing, surfing and swamp exploration for a professional career in environmental history to understand how changes to rivers, estuaries and wet lands are important to understanding human history and our present-day ecological crisis. His dissertation, "Between the Rivers and Tides: A Hydraulic History of the Mekong Delta, 1820-1975," reflects the transposition of his love affair with water and history at home to a thriving agricultural region in Vietnam. Once finding himself in the cities, backroads and ricefields of Vietnam, he decided that he liked it enough to spend over six years there as a teacher and a student of Vietnamese language and culture. He is currently working on expanding the dissertation into a book on the Mekong Delta and is writing a monograph on land surveys involving spatial analyses of historic land use maps to assess spatial patterns of environmental change in the past. When he's not in the archives, the classroom or a quagmire, David enjoys creating place-based, mixed-media sculptures that often incorporate historical or cultural themes or material in their construction. His teaching interests include Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and environmental history.

Degrees

B.A. American History 1992

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

M.A. Southeast Asian, Environmental History 1998

University of Washington

Ph.D. Southeast Asian history, Vietnamese History, Environmental, Georgraphy 2004

University of Washington

Awards

2006 University of California, President's Research Fellowship in Humanities
2002 Fulbright Scholarships
2001-02 Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, Vietnam
2000-01 Fulbright Travel Fellowship, Vietnam
1999-2000 Blakemore Foreign Language Grant, Vietnam
1999 Ford Foundation Southeast Asian Studies Small Research Grant


Research Area

Southeast Asia; Vietnamese; environmental history

Publications

“Problematic Progress: Reading Environmental and Social Change on the Vinh Te Canal in the Western Mekong Delta,” in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (February 2003), pp. 77-96.
“Canals in the Mekong Delta: A Historical Overview from 200 CE to the Present,” in Jay H. Lehr, ed., The Encyclopedia of Water (New York: John Wiley & Sons, forthcoming 2004)