I am an historian of late imperial China, especially the Ming (1368-1644). My research and teaching focus on Chinese social, legal, and book history. I am currently researching the history of legal education, schools, and libraries in imperial China. Education Ph.D., University of Minnesota J.D., University of Minnesota M.A., University of Minnesota B.S-Art., University of …
I’m a cultural historian of modern Korea with interests in national identity formations, class and gender relations, food and food ways, cultural memory, and Cold War Korea/Cold War Asia. My first book, Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea, explored South Korean public discourse on postcolonial nation building during the formative post-Korean …
I am a historian of the United States and international and diplomatic history. In my research and teaching, I focus on three issues that have centrally informed the position of the United States vis-à-vis the decolonizing world during the twentieth century and beyond: the relationships between liberalism and racial formations, global militarism and sovereignty, and …
I am a historian of modern China. But I am particularly interested in the ways that natural resources define and often limit state power in Chinese border regions. My book, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2018, offers a …
As a scientist-turned-historian, I specialize in the history of science, medicine, and technology in modern China. My first book project, tentatively titled Biopolitical Socialism: Antibiosis, Scientific Capital, and China’s Cold War Rationality, 1949–90, demonstrates how biotechnology played a central role in transforming the peasant-based Chinese Communist Party into a thriving modern industrial regime. The book …
My work probes the historical conditions for the possibility of philosophy and politics in the modern world and in East Asia in particular. I am generally interested in the attempts of East Asian intellectuals to resist modernity through reviving premodern philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism. My first book, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: …
I am a historian of early modern and modern Japan with particular interest in intellectual, religious, and social history. My current work examines the development in the 1890s and early 1900s of the “Way of the Samurai” (bushido) as a seemingly traditional, indigenous code of honor thought to embody the “spirit” of Japan. That is, …
Louise Young is Marilyn B. Young WARF Professor of Japanese History. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching interests include social and intellectual history, Japanese imperialism, the Asia-Pacific War, …