Cody Joseph Billock is an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School and doctoral candidate in the History Department at Ohio University. His dissertation, “Cold War Citadel: Huế & the Global Vietnamese Civil War, 1945-1975,” employs the central Vietnamese city of Huế as a case study to argue that the three decades of war during the First (1946-1954) and Second (1959-1975) Indochina Wars were underwritten by one continuous civil war among the Vietnamese. This conflict between the Communist Party and various anti-communist groups was fueled by competing visions of what a modern Vietnamese nation-state should look like. This thesis challenges older scholarship that portrayed these conflicts as simple wars of national resistance against foreign invaders. For this project, the Society for Military History (SMH) awarded him their top dissertation award, the 2025 Allan R. Millett Dissertation Research Fellowship Award.

His work is based on extensive international archival research in the United States, France, Hungary, and Vietnam and is facilitated by extensive language training in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French. He has previously served as a fellow for the Society of Military History’s Summer Seminar and the Wilson Center’s Cold War Archival Research (CWAR) Institute. He is trained as a historian of the Cold War, military history, US foreign policy, and Vietnamese studies and actively collaborates across these fields.