Assistant Professor of History
Modern East Asian History
On leave academic year 2025-2026.
I am a historian of law, empire, and the environment in modern China, Japan and Northeast Asia. In addition to a deep fascination with the many transnational connections in this world region, I have a special obsession with a Northeast Asian borderland called Manchuria. My first book project, tentatively entitled “Peasants Versus Empires: Civil Justice and Transnational Legal Sedimentation in Manchuria, 1881-1951,” explores how the peasants, merchants and vagabonds of the borderland shaped the inter-imperial rivalry between China, Japan and Russia through law. Having performed detective work on hundreds of legal battles straddling many borders in as many languages, I tell an alternative story about the emergence of Northeast Asian legal modernity in a world of vernacular legal engagements. I also explore how this transnational legal experience conditioned post-1945 developments in China. An article from this project, published in Modern Asian Studies, received an Honorable Mention for the Jane Burbank Article Prize in Global Legal History by the American Society of Legal History. I am also working on two other book-length projects. One examines how non-agrarian ecologies and their inhabitants – human or otherwise – participated in the making of the modern Chinese and Northeast Asian legal order. The other analyzes how local people developed new conceptions of sovereignty and social participation through transnational political practices – mixed voting, jurisdictional sharing, and so on – in China’s northern borderlands with Japan, Korea, and Russia from the early 20th century to the early PRC.
I teach modern Chinese and Japanese history. Of the many things I enjoy in the history profession, working with amazing students is one of the most rewarding. I always welcome new conversations, so please feel free to be in touch!
Before joining BU, I completed a PhD in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Agrarian Studies at Yale. I also conducted postdoctoral research and taught at the University of British Columbia. My passion for historical research started when I was an undergraduate student at Peking University in China and Waseda University in Japan.