35th annual World History Association conference
Day 2: Friday, June 26
8:00-8:30
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #5 8:30-10:00
5A: Meet the Authors
Explaining International History (2026)
Room 105
Abstract:
This session is meant to be an introduction to, and discussion about, Cambridge University Press' forthcoming volume called Explaining International History, edited by Erez Manela, Elisabeth Leake, and Heather Salter. Its purpose is to understand and explore the emerging field of international history. While top universities in the United States and the United Kingdom offer Ph.D., M.A., or undergraduate programs in the field and university presses in North America and Europe have established flourishing book series devoted to it, until now there has been no comprehensive, up-to-date guide to the central concepts, approaches, and methods that make up this rapidly expanding field. This volume, written by leading scholars of international history whose expertise spans a variety of specializations, is the first of its kind. Its twenty-four essays explore how the recent scholarship on international history has reshaped once-dominant narratives in the field; how new perspectives and approaches have opened a whole range of new historical questions; and how historians might imagine the future of the field. Given the field's close relationship to the field of World History, its authors and editors are eager for a World History audience to weigh in on the project. This session features two of the volume's editors (Manela and Salter) and two of its chapter authors (Louro and Salter), including the author of the chapter on World History itself (Salter).
Presenters:
Heather Salter, Northeastern University
Erez Manela, Harvard University
Michele Louro, Salem State University
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5B: Roundtable
Closed Borders, Enduring Connections: Myanmar as a Case Study of Globality after Globalization
Room 204
Abstract:
The post-globalization era is increasingly characterized by hardened borders, geopolitical fragmentation, and the retreat of liberal internationalism. Myanmar offers a compelling case through which to examine this paradox. Following the 2021 military coup, the country faced intensified political isolation, international sanctions, border securitization, and diplomatic marginalization. Yet this paper argues that, despite conditions of apparent closure, Myanmar has remained deeply embedded in regional and global networks, revealing the persistence of global connections beyond formal globalization. Adopting a world history and global history perspective, the study analyzes Myanmar as a site where coercive state authority and transnational connectivity coexist. It demonstrates how trade flows, illicit and informal economies, cross-border labor migration, digital communication, resource extraction—including rare earth minerals—and regional supply chains continue to link Myanmar to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and global markets. These connections increasingly operate through non-liberal, asymmetric, and securitized channels rather than through open borders or multilateral frameworks. Placing contemporary Myanmar within a longer historical trajectory, the paper compares the current moment with earlier periods of restricted mobility and political closure, including colonial border regimes, Cold War alignments, and post-independence authoritarian governance. This comparison shows that Myanmar has historically been “globally connected without being globally integrated,” challenging linear narratives of globalization followed by deglobalization. The paper advances the concept of “coerced globality,” in which global connections persist through violence, informality, and geopolitical necessity rather than through voluntary integration. Myanmar’s experience demonstrates that closed borders do not eliminate global interdependence; instead, they transform its forms, actors, and power hierarchies. By foregrounding Myanmar, this study contributes to debates in world history about how globality survives and mutates under authoritarianism, sanctions, and border closures in the twenty-first century.
Presenters:
Amar Kumar, Central University of Himachal Pradesh
Chandra Shekhar, Central University of Himachal Pradesh
_______
5C: Panel
Pax Japano-Russica in Modern World History: Mobility, Identity, and Borderland Networks
Room 304
Abstract:
Between the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the expiration of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in 1945, the Russo-Japanese rivalry was contained by a fragile strategic balance that paradoxically fostered an unprecedented wave of inter-imperial exchange. Koreans, Mongols, Tatars, Kazakhs, and Buryats, among others, moved across imperial frontiers, seeking in the rival empire both a refuge and a vehicle for their own aspirations toward nationhood and modernity. Machinations through proxies, containment of direct warfare, agitation of minoritarian identities, and borderlands animated by military reconnaissance, insurgency, and arms trafficking prefigured the geopolitical and ideological structures that would later define the Cold War. Yet existing scholarship has rarely recognized this Pax Japano-Russica as a crucial precursor, and indeed, a direct progenitor, of the Cold War complex. This panel examines how Pax Japano-Russica shaped the geopolitical and ideological alignments of modern Northeast Asia, both in its own time and in its afterlife during the Cold War. Collectively, the papers propose a new prism for Cold War studies: one that situates Pax Japano-Russica as the formative crucible from which the region’s Cold War order emerged. By foregrounding the continuities between these two historical moments, the panel highlights how non-dominant actors animated inter-bloc mobility and how subordinate identities became the very substance through which hegemonic block formations were consolidated.
Chair:
Peng Hai, University of Pittsburgh
Papers:
“Buryat and Kazakh National Movements and Their Contacts with Japan: The Dual Roles of Japan and the Bolsheviks in the Destabilization and Reconstruction of Imperial Order”
Tomohiko Uyama, Hokkaido University
“From Imperial Borderlands to Cold War Frontiers: North Korean Workers in the Soviet Pacific North”
Donghyun Woo, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
“Korean Liminal Citizenship and Urban Mobility in Early Twentieth-Century Vladivostok”
Younghwa Song, Independent Scholar
“The Unravelling of Pax Japano-Russica in China’s Muslim Northwest: Charting Turkestan in Imperial Japan’s Muslim Policy”
Peng Hai, University of Pittsburgh
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5D: Panel
Trans-Imperial Entanglements: British East Africa and Japan in the Interwar World
Room 403
Abstract:
During the interwar years, British East Africa and Japan became linked through a set of commercial, informational, and cultural entanglements that unfolded with remarkable speed. Within a decade, Japanese trading companies opened direct shipping lines to Mombasa, entered regional distribution networks, and transformed everyday material life: East Africans adopted Japanese shoes, clothing, enamelware, and other household goods. By the early 1930s, Japanese manufacturers were displacing British products across the region, unsettling established commercial hierarchies and prompting British officials to reassess the security of imperial markets.
Scholarship has largely approached this encounter through British archives, which portray Japan as a threatening intruder into “protected” imperial space. Yet Japanese sources—trade journals, consular reports, industrial surveys, and exporters’ writings—reveal a far more complex set of relationships. They illuminate how Japanese actors interpreted African societies, evaluated British colonial rule, and positioned themselves within a global order characterized by shifting imperial rivalries and intensifying South–South connections.
This panel asks how Japan’s presence reshaped British East Africa—and, equally, how East Africa reshaped Japanese understandings of empire, markets, and civilizational hierarchy. Taking Japan not simply as a competitor but as a trans-imperial actor operating within the British imperial economy while remaining outside its governing structures, the panel interrogates the multiple roles Japan occupied: competitor, collaborator, interpreter, and catalyst. Collectively, the papers argue that Japanese activities exposed vulnerabilities within the British Empire, generated new forms of knowledge about African markets, and opened spaces for East African consumer agency.
By foregrounding the reciprocal production of information, the civilizing discourses embedded in manufactured goods, and the co-creation of new material cultures, the panel contributes to emerging debates in world and imperial history on trans-imperialism, global commodity circuits, and the role of non-Western empires in shaping African colonial economies.
Chair:
Miki Sugiura, Hosei University
Discussants:
Jeremy Prestholdt and/or Kate Frederickson
Papers:
“Shared Information Ecologies: Japan, Britain, and the Making of Commercial Frontiers in Interwar East Africa”
Robert Fletcher, University of Missouri
“Zakka: Miscellaneous Goods, Cheapness, and Civilization”
Hideaki Suzuki, National Museum of Ethnology
“Clothing East Africans: Japanese Exports, Imperial Competition, and Consumer Agency”
Miki Sugiura, Hosei University
_______
5E: Panel
China: Modernity, Media, and Global Imaginaries
Room 201
Abstract:
This panel examines how Chinese and Chinese-colonial societies have imagined, performed, and negotiated their relationships to global modernity across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric D. de Roulet's paper on scholars-in-exile from the early Republic of China re-examines the personal agency of intellectual émigrés, challenging the assumption that exile was a condition of passivity and asking how these figures actively shaped their own trajectories and the intellectual worlds they entered. Guangzhi Huang's paper on the spatial whitening of Guangzhou in the reform era examines how Chinese urban planning in the post-Mao period has drawn on European architectural styles to construct a racially and culturally coded imaginary of cosmopolitan modernity. Yvonne Liao's paper on piano storyboards and philharmonic reviews in late-colonial Hong Kong uses music and cultural criticism from 1987 to 1991 to trace how a colonial city negotiated its impending handover through the medium of Western classical music. Together, the papers argue that Chinese modernity has always been a project of self-fashioning in relation to global cultural hierarchies, involving strategies of performance, exile, collaboration, and spatial mimicry that defy simple narratives of East-West encounter.
Chair:
Daniel Knorr, Illinois State University
Papers:
“Dissidents Abroad or Stranded Sea Turtles? Re-examining the Personal Agency of Scholars-in-Exile from the Early Republic of China”
Eric D. de Roulet, University of British Columbia
“Pretending to be in Europe: Spatial Whitening of Guangzhou in the Reform Era”
Guangzhi Huang, Thomas Jefferson University
“Empire's Global Grain: Uneven Connections, Piano Storyboards, and Philharmonic Reviews from Late-Colonial Hong Kong, 1987-1991”
Yvonne Liao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
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5F: Panel
Maritime Routes, Imperial Travel, and Global Labor
Room 208
Abstract:
This panel traces the maritime and overland routes through which goods, people, and power have moved across the world from antiquity to the present, attending to the full human range from ancient merchant adventurers to contemporary victims of forced labor. Ian Abbey's paper on the captured Manila Prize offers a vivid case study in the violence and opportunism that were inseparable from early modern oceanic commerce, using a prize capture to illuminate the intersection of naval power, commercial rivalry, and imperial sovereignty in the Pacific. Aidan Forth's paper on imperial travel and the Alexandria-Suez corridor examines how the construction of the overland railway transformed the experience of imperial mobility, making the journey between Britain and India a different kind of encounter with empire and environment. Olawale B. Salami’s paper on the Nigerian-Malaysian connection in human trafficking and forced labor brings the panel's longue durée of maritime labor mobility into the present, revealing how contemporary trafficking networks exploit the same oceanic corridors that earlier connected the Indian Ocean world through commerce and migration. Together, the papers argue that maritime and overland routes have always simultaneously enabled the movement of commodities, wealth, and human beings — including those moved against their will.
Chair:
Cynthia Ross, East Texas A&M University
Papers:
“Our Long and Fatiguing Voyage: The Captured Manila Prize”
Ian Abbey, Prairie View A&M University
“Railroading the Desert: Imperial Travel and the Alexandria-Suez Corridor”
Aidan Forth, MacEwan University
“The Nigerian-Malaysian Connection in Human Trafficking and Forced Labour”
Olawale B. Salami, Olabisi Onabanjo University
_______
5G: Workshop
Helping History Students Interpret Quantitative Evidence
Room 302
Abstract:
This workshop session is based on integrating quantitative reasoning (QR) pedagogy – working with data, graphs, etc – into courses in ways that are aligned with historical inquiry. Historical data are often the only glimpses that survive of peoples’ lives and experiences, and connect scholars and descendants to the past (Jessica Marie Johnson, 2018). The pursuit of standardized data systems over time with the goal of interoperability is another form of global connection that spans and challenges political and cultural borders, making our work especially relevant for this year’s theme, “Closed Borders and Global Connections.”
Presenters Sharpe and Winton have collaborated on a substantial overhaul of Sharpe’s existing global unit on slavery which contrasts the 500-year nobi system in Korea with the transatlantic slave trade of Africans, focusing on Haiti and other French Caribbean sites. Students are introduced to quantitative data and databases in the context of historical research through a series of scaffolded activities including a group project using the longstanding Slave Voyages database.
The workshop will outline the pedagogical choices made to support student quantitative skills in historical analysis and facilitate opportunities for faculty to think through QR in their courses. As the instructor and an historian, Sharpe will describe her course and connections with history and digital humanities pedagogies. While QR is a common curricular goal across US higher education, many schools do not have dedicated staff to help humanities faculty incorporate QR into the curriculum. As a QR program director and biologist by training, Winton will help faculty consider how they can adapt this work to their courses and institutional contexts. Sharpe and Winton are both experienced faculty developers; by presenting together, they embody the collaborative relationship between faculty and staff, across disciplinary training, to help faculty reach the goals they have for their courses.
Presenters:
Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, Normandale Community College
Lin Su Winton, Carleton College
10:00-10:15
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #6 10:15-11:45
6A: Roundtable
Teaching World History in an Age of Global Interdependence and Backlash
Room 106
Abstract:
The WHA Annual Meeting asks, “how can we write, teach, and think about world history in a moment characterized both by global entanglement and anti-globalist politics?” This roundtable is envisioned as a chance to bring together secondary and college-level educators who come from training in various regions and specializations to reflect on how we teach world history today. The goal for this roundtable is to prioritize conversation, pedagogical exchange, and practical insight on the shared challenges instructors at both the secondary and undergraduate levels face in an increasingly politicized classroom. We will explore how the current social, political, and economic environment of the U.S. is influencing our teaching of world history, as well as how we negotiate our own political/ideological position in the classroom. Responding directly to the conference theme, Closed Borders and Global Connections: Being Global after Globalization, participants will examine how anti-globalist rhetoric, culture-war politics, post-truth narratives fueled by social media/AI, and ideological polarization are shaping classroom dynamics, curricular design, and student engagement. By bridging secondary and higher education perspectives, this roundtable aims to produce practical insights for navigating politicized classrooms while sustaining the intellectual integrity and global scope of world history.
Chair:
Jack Gronau, Phillips Exeter Academy
Presenters:
Matthew Bowser, Ohio Wesleyan University
Judi Freeman, World History Association
Monica Ketchum-Cardenas, Arizona Western College
_______
6B: Panel
Korea and Okinawa in a Transimperial Perspective: Colonial and Cold War Cultures in East Asia
Room 105
Abstract:
Drawing on understudied materials including films, photographs, poems, and radio programs, this panel explores spatial and temporal frameworks in trans-imperial history. Although the field of trans-imperial history has grown and shed light on the intertwined natures of multiple empires, it tends to focus on “the high age of empire” at the turn of the twentieth century (Hogason and Sexton 2020). Arguably, conceptual distinctions and convergences among different forms of colonialism also remain understudied. Studies of settler colonialism, other colonial formations, postcoloniality, and decoloniality have often developed in disparate scholarly conversations.
By centering on colonial, postcolonial, and Cold War cultures in East Asia and the transpacific spheres, this panel aims to complicate transnational perspectives on the history of empire and colonialism. Through case studies of colonial Korea and its diaspora, US-occupied Okinawa, and Park Chung Hee-era South Korea, we foreground colonial and postcolonial experiences in trans-imperial cultures. The unexpected, uneven, and frequently violent encounters that unfolded in these spaces force us to investigate connections across the ostensibly closed borders enforced by the US and Japanese empires. Tracing ideas, images, and sound traveled through literature and mass media, this panel questions how decolonial struggles, the discourse of indigeneity, and Cold War cultures shaped, and were shaped by, trans-imperial politics. In so doing, we will reveal the continuity and specificity of colonial formations across the geographies and temporalities of empire.
Chair:
Pil Ho Kim, Ohio State University
Papers:
“Skewering Empires: Intercolonial Poetics in Colonial Korea and the Diaspora”
Hiroaki Matsusaka, Ritsumeikan University
“Transimperial Imaginary of Indigeneity Enacted in US-occupied Okinawa”
Marie Nitta, Musashi University
“Transimperial Sound: South Korean Radio in the 20th Century”
Jihyun Shin, MacEwan University
_______
6C: Panel
The Politics of Trans-Cultural Knowledge Making in Early Modern Asia
Room 204
Abstract:
In the early modern period, the intensifying movements of materials, plants, and personnel generated a surge in cross-cultural knowledge making. Rather than viewing these exchanges as seamless transmissions of information, this panel investigates the productive tensions between material realities and their myriad textual representations. We interrogate how geography, botany, and craftsmanship were conceptualized through the lenses of creative imagination, philological traditions, and political visions, which created gaps between textual authority and empirical reality.
Starting from Northeast Asia, Sixiang Wang explores the eighteenth-century Korean shipwreck narrative Records of Drifting Across the Sea (1771), arguing that the “drifting records” function less as documentary accounts than political allegories to envision a specific interstate order. Shifting to botanical exchange, Yijun Wang traces the transmission of citrus varieties and nomenclature across China, Korea, and Japan, revealing how classical textual frameworks and philological traditions often obscure or distorted actual biological specimens in transcultural contexts. Finally, moving from East Asia to Central Asia, Yulian Wu investigates the Qing court’s perception of Hindustan jade and its mythical “water-grinding” technique, illustrating how imaginative interpretations of foreign craft technology served the epistemic purpose of empire-building. Together, this panel moves away from treating historical texts as transparent records of information. Instead, we center our discussion on the opacity and fluidity of transcultural exchanges, treating "misinformation" and "imagination" not as merely errors to be corrected, but as productive sites of inquiry for understanding the politics of knowledge making in early modern Asia.
Chair and Discussant:
Jung Lee, Ewha Womans University
Papers:
“Political Tropes and Contrived Scenarios in Korean Shipwreck Narratives: “Drifting Records” as Maritime Allegories in Eighteenth-Century East Asia”
Sixiang Wang, University of California, Los Angeles
“Abrasives or Not: Jade Crafting Technique and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Qing China”
Yulian Wu, Michigan State University
“Dongting Orange in Jeju: Citrus Knowledge Across Borders in Early Modern East Asia”
Yijun Wang, New York University
_______
6D: Panel
Korean Diaspora: Community Formation, Migration, and Space-Making
Room 304
Abstract:
This panel explores the diverse trajectories of Korean-related migration and community formation, examining how people and objects move across borders to create new forms of belonging. Ta Lan Khanh's paper on Korean space-making in Ho Chi Minh City challenges globalization frameworks by arguing that Korean community formation in Vietnam operates through networked diaspora logics that differ fundamentally from the flows celebrated in neoliberal globalization narratives. Ferruh Mutlu Binark's material culture study of Tatar migrants in early twentieth-century Korea recovers a little-known chapter in the multicultural history of the peninsula, using a wooden chest and family photographs to reconstruct the intimate history of an intercultural encounter in Seoul. Boram Yi and Lisen Gottavall's study of how Korea came to Baltimore traces the formation of an understudied Korean American community in a city not typically associated with Korean immigration, contributing to the diversification of Korean diaspora geography beyond Los Angeles and New York. Jeongah Lee, Bela Boxman, and Sangwoo Han's paper on the career paths of scholars in Danseong examines how academic mobility opens and closes borders in a specific Korean locality, linking individual professional trajectories to the broader history of intellectual exchange. Together, these papers argue that Korean diaspora is not a single homogenous phenomenon but a set of differentiated processes of community formation that cannot be reduced to any single model of global mobility.
Chair:
Corina González-Stout, Northwest Vista College
Papers:
“Networked Diaspora, Not Globalization: Korean Community Space-Making in Ho Chi Minh City”
Ta Lan Khanh, Ho Chi Minh City Cadre Academy
“The Narrative of Material Culture: Early 20th-Century Tatar Diaspora in Korea, Their Migration, and Intercultural Communication through a Korean Chest and Family Photographs”
Ferruh Mutlu Binark, Hacettpe University
“Is there Koreatown in Baltimore, USA? How Korea came to Baltimore, Maryland”
Boram Yi, University of Baltimore
Lisen Gottavall, University of Baltimore
“Opening Closed Borders: Career Paths of Scholars in Danseong”
Jeongah Lee, Ajou University
Béla Boxman, Ajou University
Sangwoo Han, Ajou University
_______
6E: Panel
Ghanaian Worldings: Three Global Engagements from West Africa
Room 403
Abstract:
This panel examines how Ghanaians have imagined, navigated, and reshaped the wider world across two+ centuries, using worlding as an analytic to foreground how global visions are generated from particular West African places. We note that Ghanaian worlding’s are often left out of the global ‘world history’ picture, as are many others. Jennifer Hart’s presentation explores Accra as a site where imperial planners, development agencies, and diasporic cultural currents projected competing global ideals—from “model colony” to “capital of cool”—and shows how residents fashioned urban lives that engaged, contested, and reworked these shifting imaginaries. Trevor Getz’s analysis turns to late-nineteenth-century Cape Coast, where Anglophone communities avidly debated global politics, science, religion, and culture. Drawing on AI-assisted analysis of Gold Coast newspapers, it reveals a richly textured public sphere in which Gold Coasters interpreted events from Liverpool to India to the Americas, crafting their own sense of the world and their place within it. Finally, Tony Yeboah examines Kumase’s courtyard architecture as a material expression of transnational life. It traces how colonial interventions and later the remittance-funded building practices of Asante burgers reshaped domestic space and social relationships, producing built forms that make visible the region’s evolving weltanschauung. Together, these papers illuminate the diverse ways Ghanaians have worlded the world.
Chair:
Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University
Papers:
“Immigration, Remittances, and the Architectural Landscape of Kumase, Ghana”
Tony Yeboah, Tulane University
“Living in a Model City: Negotiating Global Ideals and Local Realities in Ghana’s Capital”
Jennifer Hart, Virginia Tech
“The World From the 19th Century Gold Coast: Talking, Debating, Gossiping”
Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University
_______
6F: Meet the Authors
Room 201
Real Lives in the Eighteenth Century (2025)
Rebecca Boone, Lamar University
Real Lives in the Eighteenth Century presents a global history using four sets of biographies to illustrate corresponding situations in different geographical regions. Loosely based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, the four chapters focus on maritime trade, letters, empire, and revolution. The vibrant narratives that span four continents include the following pairs: Tupaia (c.1725-1770) and Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797), seafarers of the Pacific and Atlantic; Phillis Wheatley (c.1753-1784), and Ho Xuan Huong (c.1772-c.1822), poets of revolution; Marie Antoinette (1745-1792) and Catherine the Great (1729-1796), princesses at foreign courts; and José Gabriel Túpac Amaru (c.1742-1781) and Toussaint Louverture (c.1743-1803), leaders of revolutions. As a global history, this volume covers political upheaval in five regions: America, France, Haiti, Peru, and Vietnam. It explores key concepts such as freedom, knowledge, and trade in relation to the bondage and exploitation that accompanied the expansion of world empires and international trade systems. Taking the indomitable human spirit as its guiding theme, Real Lives includes dramatic stories of triumph, defeat, and unimaginable survival. It immerses readers in the fascinating, inspiring, and often tragic aspects of life in the eighteenth century.
World in Motion: A Dynamic History of Humankind (2026)
Jonathan T. Reynolds, Northern Kentucky University
Erik Gilbert, Arkansas State University
Authored by Jonathan T. Reynolds and Erik Gilbert, World in Motion is a core world history text is built around the idea that EVERYTHING MOVES. People (and their Identities), Goods, Ideas, the Environment, and even our understandings of History itself are always in motion. More so, the concept of motion helps to blur and complicate the boundaries that humans so love to create and impose on our understandings of our world and history. Come meet at least one of the authors and see if this is the world history textbook Of Your Dreams!
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6G: Panel
Public History, Historiography, and the Politics of Heritage
Room 302
Abstract:
This panel examines how history is practiced, institutionalized, and performed for public audiences, attending to the political and ideological work that "heritage" and historical representation accomplish in different national and cultural contexts. Takuya Tokuhara's paper on the internationalization of public history and its Asian reappraisal asks how non-Western practitioners are reshaping the global field of public history, challenging the professional norms and institutional frameworks that have been dominated by North American and European models. Sota Maruono's paper on the study of ancient Mediterranean world history in Japan explores how Japanese scholars and students use apparently distant civilizations to interrogate categories of "we" and "others," demonstrating that world history education is always implicated in the construction of national and cultural identity. Ioana Besleaga's paper on Plagino's heritage in Romania examines how the legacy of a historical figure navigates the tension between private philanthropy and public utility, revealing how heritage claims are shaped by competing interests and institutional frameworks. Jonathan Tang's paper on media, morality, and mythmaking in early twentieth-century China uses the story of a warlord, his daughter, and his gigolo to examine how popular media constructed and contested public historical memory, showing that mythmaking has always been central to the political uses of the past. Together, the papers argue that public history is a globally contested domain in which professional norms, national traditions, and political interests interact to determine which pasts are remembered and how.
Chair:
Vera Parham, American Military University
Papers:
“Reconsidering the Expansion of Historical Practitioners: The Internationalization of Public History and an Asian Reappraisal”
Takuya Tokuhara, Yokohama Senior High School for International Studies
“Rethinking We and Others through Open Studies on the Ancient Mediterranean World History in Japan”
Sota Maruono, Tokiwa University High School
“Plagino's Heritage: Between Philanthropy and Public Utility”
Ioana Beșleagă, Romanian Academy
“The Warlord, His Daughter, and His Gigolo: Media, Morality and Mythmaking in Early 20th Century China”
Jonathan Tang, Pepperdine University
11:45-13:15
Lunch break
Explore the area surrounding the IGC complex that contains George Mason University Korea. On nearby streets, there are numerous options for lunch.
12:00-17:00
Promotional and cultural experience booths
Event Hall 101 (Matz Hall)
Sponsored by Mason Korea, Incheon University HUSS, and Korean Cultural Experience.
Student-led promotional booths, including individual booths for Mason Korea, the Center for Korean Culture and Society (CKCS), the INU HUSS program, and the Incheon Tourism Organization, will enable visitors to engage in Korean cultural experiences, including trying on traditional Korean attire--royal robes for kings and queens and ceremonial wedding Hanbok--and receiving personalized Hangeul calligraphy of their names, creating opportunities for interactive cultural exchange.
13:00-16:00
Light refreshments
Location: Lobby (1st floor)
Session #7 13:15-14:45
7A: Special Plenary Session
Writing, Teaching, and Scaling World History
Rooms 105/106
Abstract:
What does it mean to write and teach world history in the 21st century? This plenary session brings together historians whose work spans Africa, Asia, the Indian Ocean world, and China in a global context, this plenary examines the methodological and pedagogical challenges of narrating the past beyond the nation-state. Drawing on their diverse regional and thematic expertise, the panelists will discuss how historians balance what analytical scales best illuminate historical connections and how global history can be taught and written about in ways that remain both rigorous and accessible in an era of renewed nationalist storytelling.
Chair:
Sharika D. Crawford, United States Naval Academy
Presenters:
Laura J. Mitchell, University of California, Irvine
Heather Salter, Northeastern University
Qiao Yu, Capital Normal University
Session #8 15:00-16:30
8A: Roundtable
Borders of Connection: Encounters, Circulation, and Mobility
Room 106
Abstract:
This roundtable examines a central paradox of modern world history: encounters, circulation, and mobility often produced not openness, but new boundaries of culture, politics, and economy. Spanning modern China, colonial India, the Burma-China borderlands, and late nineteenth-century Europe, the panel explores how ideas, religious practices, peoples, and commodities moved across regions while being translated, contested, and regulated in local settings. The papers show how foreign constitutional models in China were reinterpreted rather than simply adopted; how missionary networks in Mysore intensified cultural division even as they expanded contact; how American Protestant expansion reshaped minority identities across imperial borderlands; and how the circulation of American kerosene generated trade barriers through the language of risk and safety. Taken together, these presentations highlight how modern connectivity became a means of producing new forms of exclusion, differentiation, and boundary-making.
Chair:
Ilnyun Kim, Ewha Womans University
Presenters:
Donghyuk Kim, Ewha Womans University
Geonjoon Bae, Beijing Normal University
Sinae Hyun, Inha University
Minseok Jang, Korea University
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8B: Panel
History and the Popular Gaze: National Cinema After Globalization
Room 105
Abstract:
How has the teaching of film in history classrooms in the age of streaming transformed history classrooms? What is the integrity of national culture in an age when audiences are dispersed globally? How are popular representations of the past challenging history as practiced in its conventional institutional sites?
The papers in this panel take up these questions and explore film and history in diverse global locales and point to possible re-articulations of nation/global after globalization. If it can be said that academic historical practice held hegemonic sway over popular genres like film and fiction, in the past decade, we see the rise of popular challenges to the same practice. These popular challenges are taking the form of global, post-secular, majoritarian perspectives.
Neilesh Bose will explore the significance of a popular retelling of a history of decolonization in the Global North. He explores the story of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba as told in the 2024 film Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat as a global story told in the Global North. Chris Chekuri explores the post-secular narration of tribal uprisings in the popular Telugu film, RRR, and asks how the film resolves post-secularity for a global audience. Sean Hanretta explores the rise of popular African film in the American classroom and the questions of translation of history and genre involved. All three papers examine how the past is portrayed in the new global and transnational context and ask what new global imaginings are visible after the era of globalization.
Chair:
Christopher Chekuri, San Francisco State University
Papers:
“Decolonization in Film: The Global Framework of an African History”
Neilesh Bose, University of Victoria
“Being Global the Hindu Way: “New Historical” Indian Cinema after Globalization”
Christopher Chekuri, San Francisco State University
“Who Learns What from Which Film? The Pedagogical Implications of Shifts in West African Cinema Production”
Sean Hanretta, Northwestern University
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8C: Panel
Anti-Communism as Neo-Colonial Tool: Transnational Peace during the Cold War
Room 204
Abstract:
Few political leaders and commentators, especially in the US, question the righteousness of anti-communism. Though scholars have explicated protest to US Cold War policy, there is little understanding of this opposition and the harassment those opposed faced. This panel will explore opposition to US Cold War policy and its relationship with transnational freedom movements. As Zifeng Liu demonstrates, the Soviet Union took leadership in the global peace struggle both to cover for its own shortcomings in military proliferation, and to expose the imperialist motivations of the capitalist states. Radical Black communists took up the Soviet call for peace; however, as Liu demonstrates, this did not mean they were averse to violence. Rather they reimagined peace within the communist cosmology and argued that peace was not just the absence of war, it required the dissolution of empire. Similarly, Denise Lynn explores the transnational movement against the Korean War. Black radical women saw the war as a threat to the communist states, and the self-determination of post-colonial nations. Black American communists organized with their compatriots overseas to expose US war crimes and reveal the US’s neo-colonial ambitions. Cacee Mabis’ study takes up a spatial analysis exploring the significance of Durban’s ‘Red Square” – designated as such because Afrikaners believed it was linked to international communism. Mabis instead shows that Nichols Square was a significant location for Indian South Africans involved in anti-Apartheid protests. Together these papers show that anti-communism has stigmatized freedom movements and silenced their importance in global freedom movements.
Chair:
Denise Lynn, University of Southern Indiana
Papers:
“Reimagining Peace: International Communism and Black Left Feminists’ Antiwar Activism in the Early Cold War”
Zifeng Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University
“Durban's 'Red Square': Indian South Africans, Anti-Apartheid Protest, and the Shadow of the Rooi Gevaar”
Cacee Mabis, University of Southern Indiana
“Women Against Forever War: Black Radical Women’s Anti-Korean War Activism”
Denise Lynn, University of Southern Indiana
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8D: Panel
Connected Worlds, Closed Borders: India and the Limits of Globalization
Room 304
Abstract:
This panel examines India’s long history of transregional connectivity without open borders, from pre-modern maritime trade to contemporary nationalism. Challenging linear narratives that equate globalization with universal openness, we argue that Indian history reveals alternative models of connection structured by empires, hierarchies, and states. This inquiry extends beyond physical borders to include the "epistemic categories" and "intellectual self-understanding" shaped by colonial pedagogy and institutionalized learning. India thus offers a critical vantage point for rethinking world history in a moment of renewed borders and political closure.
Spanning from the Harappan era to the digital age, the papers analyze interconnection shaped by trust-based systems, surveillance, and state power. Pre-modern trade networks linked South Asia to Africa and Southeast Asia through trust-based systems that remained socially bounded and uneven. Colonial rule intensified global entanglements through the circulation of labor and commodities while simultaneously redefining "knowledge, philosophy, and religion" through a "politics of translation" that framed indigenous traditions within European categories. Moments of crisis, such as global epidemics and the 1947 Partition, demonstrate how connectivity frequently provokes violent border-making and bureaucratic interdiction.
In the postcolonial period, India’s integration into global markets has coincided with hardened political borders, nationalist discourses, and new digital forms of exclusion. Taken together, this panel argues that India’s past complicates frameworks privileging globalization as a coherent or inevitable process. Instead, it highlights historical worlds that were connected but not "globalized" in the modern sense, offering essential conceptual tools for a present characterized by contested globalisms and the return of the border.
Chair:
R. Charles Weller, Washington State University
Papers:
“Connected Ports, Closed Worlds: Indian Ocean Port Cities and the Historical Limits of Globalization”
Brijeshwari Kumari Gohil, Durham University and Bhavnagar Heritage
“From Colonial Pedagogy to Civilisational Self-Assertion: Indian Knowledge, English Education, and the Re-Making of the Hindu Intellectual in the Modern World (1857-Present)”
Hitesh D. Raviya, Maharaja Sayajirao University
“Connected Reform, Bordered Afterlives: Global–National Reception and Contested Boundary-Making in Nineteenth-Century Hindu Reform Movements and Their Legacies, c. 1820s–2020s”
R. Charles Weller, Washington State University
“India at the Fault-Line of Globalisation: Between Global Leadership and Protected Lines of Control”
R.S. Khangarot, Sawai Man Singh International School
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8E: Panel
Closed Borders, Open Currents: Deception, Coercion, and Cultural Resilience in World History
Room 403
Abstract:
How do global connections persist when borders harden through war, empire, and coercive social orders? This panel examines three forms of circulation that survive under constraint: information, gendered labor, and cultural memory. Emma Allen reconstructs Operation Mincemeat (1943) to show how wartime deception moved through indirect channels, neutral Spain, forged documents, and carefully staged credibility, and evaluates Montagu's postwar memoir as a curated account shaped by censorship and self-presentation. Sarah Bryant Genung argues that patriarchy is a historically constructed system maintained through coercion and the control of women's labor, developing this claim through two comparative case studies: the formalization of gender hierarchy under Roman imperial law and the Japanese military comfort women system as state-organized sexual exploitation. Daniel Mayfield traces the biwa, a traditional Japanese lute and storytelling medium, from its courtly and martial traditions through its postwar decline and contemporary revival through cross-genre adaptation, arguing that the instrument's portability made it a durable vehicle for cultural memory across disruption. Dylan Deman grounds the panel in lived experience, drawing on oral testimony and survivor accounts to examine how ordinary Japanese civilians narrated the destruction wrought by war and the atomic bombings, arguing that civilians bear the true cost of imperial ambition. Together, these papers reveal a shared dynamic: when borders close, networks reroute through shadow systems, coerced dependencies, and resilient cultural forms that sustain connection, memory, and identity across time.
Chair:
Cynthia Ross, East Texas A&M University
Papers:
“Operation Mincemeat: Anatomy of a Wartime Hoax”
Emma Allen, East Texas A&M University
“Coercion, Labor, and the Making of Patriarchy: A Comparative Argument from Rome to World War II”
Sarah Bryant Genung, East Texas A&M University
“The Biwa and Japanese Cultural Storytelling Across Time”
Daniel Mayfield, East Texas A&M University
“Echoes of Devastation: Japan's Survival of War through the Eyes of Those Who Lived”
Dylan Deman, Independent Scholar
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8F: Panel
Japan's Empire and Postwar Transitions
Room 201
Abstract:
This panel examines how Japan's imperial project and the cataclysmic transitions that followed its collapse shaped human lives, state policies, and the cultural meaning of defeat. Ma Xinghan's paper on Japanese wartime repatriation policy investigates how Japan managed civilian populations across its empire in the years of active expansion and contraction between 1937 and 1944, revealing the human logistics of imperial retreat. Wonkyoo Lee's paper on American food aid and trade disruption in postwar Korea and Japan demonstrates how the US occupation legitimated itself through humanitarian intervention, transforming emergency relief into a durable instrument of geopolitical dependency. Anne Gedacht's paper on American military consumption of occupied Japan as dark tourism introduces the concept of leisure and visual pleasure into the occupation experience, complicating narratives of liberation and reconstruction by attending to the aestheticization of ruin. Considered together, the papers chart the full arc from imperial expansion through wartime rupture to occupied reconstruction, refusing the triumphal narrative that has too often framed the Allied occupation as straightforward liberation.
Chair:
Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh
Papers:
“Recasting Empire: Trade Disruption, Food Aid, and the Legitimation of U.S. Occupation in Postwar Korea and Japan, 1945-1950”
Wonkyoo Lee, University of Pennsylvania
“Homecoming during the war: Repatriation Policy and Civilian Exchange of Japan, 1937-1944”
Ma Xinghan, Keio University
“Relaxing in the Rubble: US Military Consumption of Japan during the Allied Occupation and Korean War as Dark Tourism”
Anne Gedacht, Seton Hall University
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8G: Panel
From “National Seclusion” to Open Societies: Movement of Knowledge and Skills Across Eurasia
Room 208
Abstract:
“National seclusion,” which sees “premodern” Asian societies as being isolated from the world before their incorporation into the modern world by nineteenth-century Western empires, remains a powerful paradigm in historiography on Asia. Although scholars have recently debunked this myth of isolation, their revisionist accounts are limited by methodological nationalism and fall short of developing a regional perspective. Moreover, recent scholarship on interactions across East Asia tends to focus on the material and textual interactions of elite Confucian literati.
In this panel, we widen our scope by employing sources from multiple contexts and explore how knowledge and skills moved across Asia. Lina Nie examines how diverse players in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries used pirates as a diplomatic weapon competing for power. H. H. Kang’s paper traces how the Jesuit science of machines was translated, reinvented, and localized across China and Korea between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, showing that Korean thinkers benefited from the productive distance to reimagine and reinvent it. Jaymin Kim compares legal codes in Chosŏn, Qing, and Nguyễn states, highlighting the complex processes of translation and negotiation that sustained Sinitic law as a regional legal system. By looking at migrant Cantonese woodworkers between Guangdong and Bengal during the nineteenth century, Kyoungjin Bae argues this vernacular craft culture generated a spectacular globality through mobility and adaptation. Together, these papers show that intra- and inter-regional mobility continued across our conventional premodern-modern division.
Chair:
Jaymin Kim, Rice University
Discussant:
Seonmin Kim, Korea University
Papers:
“From Guangdong to Bengal: Cantonese Woodworkers and Craft Connections in Nineteenth-Century Maritime Asia”
Kyoungjin Bae, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
“Translating the “Art of Force”: Jesuit Mechanics in China and Korea”
H. H. Kang, Washington University in St. Louis
“Legal Codes in Chosŏn, Qing, and Nguyễn States: A Preliminary Analysis of Early Modern Sinitic Law”
Jaymin Kim, Rice University
“Pirates as Political Pawns: Diplomacy among China, Japan, and Korea in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”
Lina Nie, Texas A&M University
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8H: Panel
U.S. Power, Cold War Developmentalism, and Transnational Resistance
Room 302
Abstract:
This panel examines American power projection and the forms of resistance, both local and transnational, that it provoked across the Pacific and Americas in the twentieth century. Minwoo Kong's paper on the US Community Development Program in South Korea in the late 1950s reveals how American development ideology produced a "grassroots high-modernism" that simultaneously empowered and coerced Korean communities, exposing the contradictions of liberal developmentalism. Michelle Morgan's paper on student negotiations of citizenship and culture in interwar Hawaii examines how young people in a colonial crossroads articulated hybrid identities that challenged the racial and civic boundaries of American empire. John-Paul Wilson's paper on the Alliance for Progress in Nicaragua provides a Latin American counterpoint, showing how Kennedy-era developmentalism reached its transformative limits when confronted by entrenched economic interests and escalating revolutionary movements. Daria Dyakonova's paper on the transnational communist women's movement in China, Korea, and Japan between 1920 and 1935 provides an explicitly internationalist challenge to US-centric narratives of Cold War resistance, recovering a suppressed history of feminist socialist solidarity that predated and paralleled American interventionism. Together, the papers argue that American power has consistently generated counter-movements and alternative visions of global order that deserve to be placed at the center of twentieth-century world history.
Chair:
Hillel Eyal, Holon Institute of Technology
Papers:
“The Trunk of Democracy and its Discontents: The Hubris of U.S. Community Development Program and the Grassroots High-Modernism in South Korea, 1956-1961”
Minwoo Kong, Columbia University
“Negotiating Identity at the Crossroads of American Empire: Students' Perspectives on Citizenship and Culture in Interwar Hawaii (1919-1941)”
Michelle Morgan, Missouri State University
“Globalization and its Transformative Limits: An Examination of the Alliance for Progress in Nicaragua (1961-1979)”
John-Paul Wilson, St. John’s University
“Transnational Red Threads: The Communist Women's Movement's Campaign in China, Korea, and Japan, 1920-1935”
Daria Dyakonova, Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Special Session 17:00-18:00
Special Session:
World History Association/Bloomsbury Academic Diversity in World History Monograph Prize Information Session
Room 304
Abstract:
Bloomsbury Academic and the World History Association are delighted to revive their Diversity in World History Monograph Prize. This is a partnership that seeks to improve the publishing opportunities available for early career scholars in the field of world history and to diversify the voices who are publishing their first full-length manuscripts. The applications for this prize involve a somewhat complex two-step process, with Round One submissions due on September 1, 2026. (Please note that applicants must be a current member of the World History Association in order to be eligible for consideration for this prize.).
During this information session, April Peake will explain the thinking behind the prize, walk participants through the process, and engage in a question-and-answer session. If you are an early career scholar, this is a golden opportunity. Please do attend this highly instructive information session.
Presenter:
April Peake, Senior Commissioning Editor, Bloomsbury Academic
17:00-17:20
Memorandum of Understanding Signing Ceremony
Event Hall 101 (Matz Hall)
Mason Korea and Incheon National University HUSS
This will formalize a partnership between George Mason University Korea and the Incheon National University HUSS Program to develop and expand collaborative initiatives in both curricular and co-curricular areas, with a shared focus on inclusion in the humanities and social sciences.
17:30-18:00
World Olympics Taekwondo Federation (WOTF) Taekwondo Demonstration
Front Lawn
A dynamic Taekwondo demonstration by the World Olympics Taekwondo Federation (WOTF) Demonstration Team will showcase the strength, discipline, and artistry of Korea's traditional martial art through synchronized movements and powerful techniques.
Evening festivities 18:30-20:00
Mason Korea Campus Dean's Reception
IGC Banquet Hall
Hosted by the Mason Korea Campus Dean, this reception commemorates the World History Association's annual conference by bringing together global scholars, representatives from the City of Incheon, and partner universities in one place. As the grand finale to a day of cultural celebration and intellectual excellence, the gathering serves as a premier networking platform to unite the global academic community and reaffirm a shared commitment to fostering world connection through the spirit of inclusion.