Jiajia Zhang is a historian of Asian America specializing in laborers, veterans, seamen, and socialist internationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

While still a teenager growing up in an unfamous community near the Texoma border, Zhang stumbled upon several works of Asian American History in her local library. A stranger to historical argument who had never heard of “Asian American Studies” before, Zhang found her understanding of US History both enriched and transformed by the chronological explanation of primary records that was Franklin Odo’s Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience. Thereafter, she dreamed of becoming an Asian Americanist herself. 

In 2018, Zhang chased that dream to Amherst College, where she studied under Odo himself, graduating with BAs in American Studies and Art & The History of Art. At Amherst, Zhang began her in-progress manuscript, Serving as Allies, Sailing as Aliens: Chinese Exclusion in the Merchant Marines as a Transatlantic Movement, a project she carried to the University of Oxford, where she completed her MSt/MA in History. Her master’s dissertation was entitled War Heroes, Bad Boys, and Union Scabs: British-Chinese and Chinese-American Sailors Who Battled Asiatic Exclusion on the Western Front. As of Fall 2023, Zhang pursues her PhD in History at Harvard University. Her research continues to engage circulations of Asiatic maritime labor between the United States, Britain, and Norway and, therein, the transnational formations and implications of America's "Asiatic Exclusion Era." She is passionate about mentoring young historians and using history to illuminate our everyday lives.