Against the Odds in Asia, 1901-2021: On Activists, Autocrats, Exiles and Empires in Several Eras This presentation, which will move between the early 20th century and the early 21st century, will explore some of the ways that people working for change in different parts of East and Southeast Asia have periodically paid close attention to […]

Join us in a celebration of H. Yumi Kim’s new book, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022). During the book talk, the author will share some of the book’s main ideas while reflecting on the process of writing a history of kinship and disease. The talk will […]

Doing Transnational Intelligence History, Reflections on Writing "Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China" From Mao Zedong’s founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 until Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972, US-China political relations were by definition sub rosa. The two […]

The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown In the past ten years, China has rapidly emerged as South Korea’s most important economic partner. With the surge of goods and resources between the two countries, large waves of Korean migrants have opened small ethnic firms in Beijing’s Koreatown, turning a […]

Why Does Japanese Fertility Remain So Low? Lessons from a Misguided Policy Approach. Japanese government policies to increase mothers’ labor force participation and simultaneously raise the country’s very low birth rate have met with mixed success. Meanwhile, gender inequality in Japan has remained higher than in nearly every other postindustrial country. Why? In this talk […]

What was “revolutionary” about Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement in 2019? This talk assesses the breakthroughs and limits of the historic uprising, against an entrenched colonial hegemony co-produced by British and Chinese rules. Specifically, we shall review four salient elements of this hegemony that have long defined the boundaries of the “political” in Hong Kong. To […]

Widespread civic duty has emerged as a last bastion against democratic backsliding. Why do some citizens feel a duty to vote, take up arms, and otherwise sacrifice for their democracies? Hur shows that the sense of obligation to be a good citizen is rooted in a force long thought to be detrimental to democracy's potential, […]

The post Korean War era observed the presence of numerous US military bases. Mixed race Korean children of these decades were often stigmatized as the children of military sex workers and straddled the legal and social borders of citizenship between an ethnic nationalist Korea and a rising superpower that was America. This talk explores mixed […]

What is the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age?In this talk, historian Victor Seow explores this question through his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago, 2021). This book uses the history of China’s onetime coal capital, Fushun, to examine how the Chinese and Japanese states that […]