James Gerien-Chen

James Gerien-Chen is a historian of modern Japan. At WEAI, he will be revising his dissertation as a monograph, which examines the Japanese in Taiwan and China through the perspectives of migration, borderlands, and law. He is also working on two shorter projects: one on the Japanese codification of “customary law” in colonial Taiwan and one that uses digital mapping tools to explore the spatial dimensions of sovereignty in treaty-port China. He will be teaching two seminars in the 2019-20 academic year: “Japanese Imperialism in East Asia” and “Transpacific Empires: Migration and Imperialism in the Making of the Modern World.” He received his PhD in History from Columbia in 2019.