Program in East Asian Studies

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 […]

Scholarship on racial politics in Japan has tended to take a dichotomous view of Japan as either a culturally homogenous, racially exceptional society where racism does not exist or a perniciously racist one. This talk examines how racism and antiracism have interactively shaped modern Japan’s political development, focusing on national and international coalitions, social movements, […]