Rate My Professor Haydon Cherry

Haydon Cherry serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University. He teaches courses including Southeast Asia in the Age of Empire, Contemporary Southeast Asia, and Approaches to History with topics such as Pirates and Prostitutes. Originally from New Zealand, Cherry earned a B.A. (Honors) in Southeast Asian Studies and an M.A. in History from the National University of Singapore. He completed his Ph.D. in History at Yale University in 2014, with a dissertation on the social history of the urban poor in colonial Saigon from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.

Cherry's first monograph, Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City (Yale University Press, 2019), traces the itineraries of six poor migrants—a prostitute, a Chinese coolie, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an invalid, and a destitute Frenchman—in early twentieth-century Saigon, navigating the regional rice economy and French colonial governance. The book co-won the 2018 First Book Award from the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. His ongoing projects include an intellectual biography of Đào Duy Anh (1904-1988), a pioneering Vietnamese Marxist intellectual who shaped modern Vietnamese language, historiography, higher education, and research institutions; this work received a 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, during which Cherry conducted research in Hanoi. Earlier, he held the 2008 Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship. Before joining Northwestern, Cherry was an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Mahindra Humanities Center in 2011-2012. Affiliated with Northwestern's East Asia Research Forum, with office in Harris Hall 217, Cherry has published in scholarly journals including the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and the Journal of Global History, advancing knowledge of urban poverty, crime, and social structures in colonial Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam and Burma.