East Asia

Will Sack’s research centers on the environmental and social history of Japan’s modern empire, especially its post-1945 afterlives. His main project looks at rural life within the modernization campaigns of America’s Cold War client states: South Korea...

William Julian’s work concerns the changes in perceptions and portrayals of China's northwest (西北) during the Republican Period. He seeks to locate these discourses not only within broader domestic debates on borderlands, but also within their global...

James Gethyn Evans is a doctoral student in History at Harvard University, specializing in modern China and Taiwan and the global history of the Cold War. His research interests include China's historical foreign relations with non-state actors, the...

Joshua Linkous is a PhD student in History and East Asian Languages, focusing on the economic, environmental, and social history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Japan. His primary region of interest is northern Tohoku (Aomori, Iwate, Akita). For his...

Charlotte Ciavarella is a PhD student in History and EALC, focusing on the social and environmental history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan. Her dissertation project looks at the development of capitalism in Japan from the perspective of...

Jeonghun Choi’s research themes center around intellectual history and book history of Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particularly, he studies how popular writers and commercial publishing houses in Japan duplicated, pirated, and...

Merle is a PhD student at the History Department since 2022, where she specialises in modern East Asian History. Her research interests include nationalism and identity, media and propaganda, and women’s history, particularly in the context of the...

Annie Zhanling Wang studies the social and cultural history of late imperial China. Her work to date explores individuals in empires, including Black theatre practitioners in the shadow of the British empire, Central Asian poets in the Mongol empire, and...

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...