East Asia

Haoran Zhang (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. student in History. He is broadly interested in the environmental, economic, and social histories of twentieth-century transpacific East Asia and the United States. His current research focuses on the sugar industries...

Rebecca Wu joined Harvard’s Ph.D. program in History and East Asian Languages in the fall of 2025. She graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in History, magna cum laude (2025). Her senior thesis, which examined petitioning practices in late...

Kayla Wilford entered the PhD program at Harvard in 2025, specializing in the social and cultural history of early-modern Japan. Her scholarly interests lie in the writing of historical imagination, focused on stories of the silenced, oppressed, and...

Cameron Hollenbeck entered Harvard’s history PhD program in Fall 2024. He specializes in modern Japanese history with a focus on the Japanese Empire. His research centers multi-ethnic communities and ideologies of race and antisemitism in Japanese...

Eric Senkit SUEN is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese history at Harvard University since 2024. His research interests include animal, environmental, food, and migration history. He is researching Japan's 20th-century horse improvement projects in East...

Yu Xie studies the legal history of pre-modern Korea. She received her B.A. in Korean Language and Literature from Peking University and her M.A. in Korean History from Seoul National University. Her master’s thesis focused on death penalty cases...

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...

Jason Chan is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at Harvard University, where he researches the history of earth sciences in twentieth-century China. For more information, please visit his site.

Kwan Woo Hahn received his B.A. from Yonsei University and A.M. in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University. The topic of his master’s thesis was the Korean authoritarian regime’s use of criminal organizations to quell the dissident voices...