Dr. Susan L. Eastman, the daughter of an enlisted Vietnam veteran, is an Assistant Professor of English at Dalton State College, and a former Lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga where she founded and co-directed, Sword and Pen, a writing group for student veterans and their family members.
Her scholarship addresses memory and war of the twentieth and twenty-first century found in memorials, literature, film and culture. In her recent book, The American War in Viet Nam: Cultural Memory at the Turn of the Century (University of Tennessee Press, 2017), Eastman analyzes veteran, civilian, American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, and Philippine memorial, literary and cinematic representations of the war produced from the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) through the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” She looks not only at American representations of the war, but also at novels by Vietnamese and Vietnamese American authors. The experiences of women figure prominently in the book: Eastman devotes two chapters to women’s experiences—one about the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, and the other about representations of American and Vietnamese women married to Vietnam veterans. She also has a forthcoming chapter “The ‘Nam Comics: Remembering the American War in Viet Nam” in an edited collection, Beyond the Quagmire: New Interpretations of the Vietnam Conflict (UNT Press, 2019).