Peter Zinoman, Assistant Professor of History, has received a Townsend Fellowship for The Colonial Bastille: A Social History of Imprisonment in Colonial Vietnam, 1862-1945. Professor Zinoman’s study will examine the relationship between the French colonial prison system and the Vietnamese Revolution and will explain how a colonial institution designed to maintain social order and suppress political dissent could develop in ways profoundly subversive to colonial power. The project contributes, Professor Zinoman points out, to three areas of theoretical inquiry: it adds a colonial dimension to the growing body of literature on the history of the modern prison; it explores the role of the colonial prison as an instrument which inadvertently promoted the formation of a national consciousness; and it explores why the notion of “discipline” as described by Michel Foucault, apparently failed to colonize the workings of the colonial prison.