35th annual World History Association conference
Day 3: Saturday, June 27
8:00-8:30
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #9 8:30-10:00
9A: Panel
Borders, Digital Ecologies, and Post-Globalization Belonging
Room 105
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Abstract:
This panel explores how people imagine and negotiate belonging across borders in an era when globalization feels both pervasive and fragile. Vera Parham’s paper on Japanese American activist organizations in Seattle shows how diasporic communities built cross-cultural and cross-border coalitions that challenged U.S. racial exclusion and critiqued Japanese militarism, offering a grassroots vision of internationalism from the mid‑twentieth century. April Wei‑West’s paper on vocal synthesizer internet communities extends the concept of diaspora into digital space, examining how online networks organized around shared musical practice generate forms of attachment, identity, and community that resemble diasporic belonging without being anchored in common ethnicity or territory. Fariza Tolesh and Diana Toimbek’s paper on digital public perceptions of Kazakhstan’s position during the Russia–Ukraine War analyzes how ordinary citizens talk about sanctions, borders, and economic sovereignty in online forums, revealing a paradox of “being global after globalization”: people remain deeply entangled in global flows even as they experience new constraints, anxieties, and fractures. Together, the papers trace how activist networks, virtual communities, and digital publics rework the meaning of borders, community, and global connection from below in the long shadow of empire, the Cold War, and the current era of geopolitical fragmentation.
Chair:
Sarah Eltabib, Adelphi University
Papers:
“Vocal Synth Internet Communities as Digital Diaspora”
April Wei-West, SAOS University of London
“A Japanese American Activist World View: How Activist Organizations in Seattle Built Cross Cultural and Cross Border Coalitions”
Vera Parham, American Military University
“Being Global after Globalization: Digital Public Perceptions of Borders, Sanctions, and Economic Sovereignty in Kazakhstan during the Russia-Ukraine War”
Fariza Tolesh, Nazarbayev University and Ulster University
Diana Toimbek, Ulster University
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9B: Panel
The Anthropocene and World History in Korea
Room 204
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Abstract:
Anthropocene history is as different from Holocene history as the Anthropocene Earth System is from the Holocene Earth System. The framework of World History straddles them both, positioning itself to answer the two big questions posed by Anthropocene history: (1) how did globally networked human systems come to overwhelm the Earth System in the middle of the 20th century? and (2) can our understanding of the past help us tackle current challenges? This panel tackles these questions through the lenses of population, energy, waste, and multispecies relations in Korea. South Korea's emergence as a prosperous modern nation from the international war (1950-53) at the beginning of the Cold War and its aftermath underscores the ironies of the Anthropocene. The postwar "great escape" from poverty and ill health described by economist Angus Deaton has been paralleled by the increased socioeconomic inequality and planetary boundary overshoot that came with the “Great Acceleration.” How to reconcile the imperatives of decency, democracy and resilience with the limits to growth is a challenge keenly felt in Korea as it is in the world writ large.
Chair:
Buhm Soon Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Papers:
“From Place to Planet: How Climatization Rescaled Local Resistance to Carbon Technocracy in Samcheok”
Minseo Cho, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Local Waters, Planetary Flights: Baikal Teal After the Cheonsu Bay Reclamation”
Hanah Sung, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
“Becoming Planetary: Marine Debris and Environmental Governance in Korea”
Jihye Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
“Deforestation, Energy Populism, and Forced Labor: Fuel Transition in South Korea, 1945-1962”
Jaeyoung Ha, Tsinghua University
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9C: Workshop
Experiencing Student-Centered Learning for Introductory World History Courses
Room 304
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Abstract:
This workshop is led by History for the Twenty-First Century (H/21), a collaborative project of the World History Association, which develops teaching modules for introductory-level world history college courses. Following an introduction to the project goals and H/21's open-access resources, the organizers (Brenna Miller and Trevor Getz) will lead an interactive workshop to demonstrate practical examples of active-learning materials, that college and university instructors have successfully implemented in their courses. Attendees will have the opportunity to experience those materials first-hand, and consider ways in which they might implement these lessons in their classes. The workshop will also showcase some of the evidence gathered to date of successful outcomes of module lessons, based on surveys and studies conducted by the H/21 team.
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Presenters:
Brenna Miller, History for the Twenty-First Century and Washington State University
Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University
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9D: Panel
Vernacular Culture, Connectivity and Sovereignty
Room 403
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Abstract:
According to Laura Doyle (2020), “inter-imperiality” is a condition in which empires continually shape one another through overlapping infrastructures, labor regimes, and affective economies. From Japanese coloniztion to U.S. military occupation, Cold War division, and ongoing geopolitical pressures, Korean history reveals how inter-imperial forces reformed and reoccupied colonial infrastructures within shifting regional and global orders. This panel explores how dynamics in modern Korea formed different sites of culture, mobility, and everyday practice.
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To pursue this approach, this panel addresses vernacular forms of connectivity and sovereignty within the inter-imperial field of Cold War Korea. Following Anna Tsing’s (2004) observation that global connections arise in local frictions, we use “vernacular” to highlight the situated, improvised, and relational practices through which ordinary actors rework imperial forces in everyday life. Breaking away from state-centric narrative, we examine how ordinary or marginalized groups forged transnational connections and enacted alternative forms of sovereignty through everyday cultural practices.
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To elaborate, Lee examines transnational parallels of Korean women artists and those from Eastern Europe and Latin America in performing arts; Auo analyzes cross-border affective histories embedded in Korean and Japanese popular music; Yoo investigates sensory and material networks of smuggling that structured everyday economic life; and Hassan delves into print media revealing Koreans’ understanding of contemporary political circumstances. Collectively, our papers demonstrate that these cultural approaches were not peripheral to the making of the modern Korean state; rather, they constituted crucial sites in which imperial legacies were reworked, Cold War structures negotiated, and new forms of agency emerged.
Chair:
Alina Hassan, Independent Scholar
Papers:
“Parallel Performance: Women’s Bodies and Political Acts in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America”
Dain Lee, University of Tokyo
“Listening to Zainichi Silence: Affective Histories Across Korea-Japan Popular Music”
Jiyoon Auo, University of Pittsburgh
“Shadow Sovereignty: Smuggling and the Sensory Life of Inter-imperial Korea”
Jieon Yoo, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Inter-Imperial Korea in Print”
Alina Hassan, Independent Scholar
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9E: Meet the Authors
Room 201
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Latin America and Human Rights Politics in West Germany, 1973-1990 (2025)
Felix A. Jimenez Botta, George Mason University Korea
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Felix Jimenez Botta's recently published book, Latin America and Human Rights Politics in West Germany, 1973-1990, is an addition to several fields: human rights, German history, and global history. In this presentation I will explain how this book helps to globalize German history and how it challenges the historiography of human rights by centering non-European actors and non-European concerns in the evolution of human rights politics in a European country such as Germany.
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Ties that Bind: People and Perception in U.S. and Korean Transnational Relations, 1905-1965 (2025)
Hannah Kim, University of Delaware
Ties That Bind narrates five stories of how a transnational community helped shape American perceptions and understandings of Korea and Koreans, from a time when only a small number of Americans knew anything about Korea to a time when most Americans were aware of Korea's geopolitical significance. Three of the moments took place when Korea was a colony of Japan: the so-called Conspiracy Case in 1911, the independence movement of 1919, and the efforts to recognize Korean independence during World War II. The other two moments transpired in the context of the Cold War, when Korean orphans and Korean exchange students came to the United States in the 1950s.In these five stories, the interplay of people, perceptions, and official and unofficial policy can be seen in the work of people who tried to influence U.S. and Korean relations by binding Americans and Koreans through shared values and experiences. They did so by portraying Koreans as Christian converts, as supporters of democracy and democratic ideals, and as people embracing Western or American cultural norms. The actors in this book did not always succeed in their goals, but through their endeavors, they facilitated policy discussions, forged ties between the United States and Korea, and began to break down cultural barriers between Koreans and Americans.
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9F: Panel
Korea and the International System
Room 208
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Abstract:
This panel brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the transnational history connecting the Korean peninsula to the international system, through processes of conflict and cooperation engendered by the Cold War and decolonization. While these diverse papers cover a range of perspectives from diplomatic history to media studies, they share a general focus on the early post-war era on the Korean peninsula and ways in which North and South were affected by and integrated into the international system as they attempted to navigate a perilous Cold War landscape. Collectively the panel presents a transnational and world history perspective on modern Korean history that highlights how key historiographical questions are addressed by examining the interests, conflicts, and agency animating the peninsula’s global linkages.
Chair:
Jihyun Shin, MacEwan University
Papers:
“William Kermode, Britain, and the American Occupation of Korea, 1947-1948”
Steven Lee, University of British Columbia
“Pro-Japanese Capital, Anti-Japanese Sentiment: The 1965 Treaty and the Disjuncture Between State Policy and Popular Narratives in South Korea”
Jihyun Shin, MacEwan University
“Agricultural Mechanization, the Cold War, and North-South Competition on the Korean Peninsula”
Moe Taylor, Korea Policy Institute
“South Korea’s Collaborator Issue and the (Post-) Cold War: A World History Perspective”
Patrick Vierthaler, Kyoto University
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9G PANEL
East Asian Modernity: Transnational Ideas, Knowledge, and Ideology
Room 302
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Abstract:
This panel explores how ideas, knowledge systems, and ideological frameworks circulated across East Asia and between Asia and Europe in the modern era, challenging narratives of intellectual exceptionalism or isolation. Aisheedyuti Roy's paper provincializes Pan-Asianism by re-examining the India-Japan relationship, challenging the Sino-Japanese centrism that has dominated histories of Asian solidarity movements and recovering the complex agency of Indian interlocutors in Pan-Asian discourse. SeungHyeon Pyo's paper traces how Ueda Kazutoshi's engagement with German Neogrammarian linguistics transformed Japanese nationalist ideology, revealing how linguistic science became a global vehicle for constructing modern national identity. Dr Suman Joshi's paper on the transimperial flows of healing knowledge from the Himalayas to the Korean Peninsula demonstrates that knowledge systems moved along imperial circuits in ways that resisted the boundaries of individual empires, creating medical traditions that were simultaneously local and transimperial. Mario Maritan's paper on the genealogy of liberal nationalism from the Habsburg Monarchy to East Asia connects European ideological traditions to their Asian receptions and transformations, interrogating how a specifically Central European model of national self-determination became available and was adapted in East Asian political thought. Together, the papers advance the argument that East Asian modernity was produced through deeply entangled intellectual histories that cannot be understood in isolation from European, South Asian, and transimperial currents. through imperial systems, commercial circuits, and diasporic communities and how labor migration stimulated new social formations, political movements, and transregional connections that reshaped the modern world.
Chair:
Robert Fletcher, University of Missouri
Papers:
“Provincializing Pan-Asianism: Rethinking India-Japan Relations”
Aisheedyuti Roy, University of Hawaii at Manoa
“Lines of Sound, Lines of Nation: Ueda Kazutoshi, the Neogrammarians, and the Transnational Grammar of Modernity”
SeungHyeon Pyo, University of Hawaii at Manoa
“Transimperial Flows of Traditional Knowledge of Healing Practices in East Asia: From the Himalayas to the Korean Peninsula”
Suman Joshi, Indian Council of Social Science Research
“The Myth of Liberal Nationalism from the Habsburg Monarchy to East Asia”
Mario Maritan, Hanyang University and Sogang University
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10:00-10:15
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #10 10:15-11:45
10A SPECIAL PLENARY SESSION
Moving Labor, Making Worlds: Migration, Empire, and Diaspora
Rooms 105/106
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Abstract:
​How did mobile workers shape the modern world order? This plenary asks historians to explain the intertwined histories of labor migration and diaspora across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, highlighting how workers moved through imperial systems, commercial circuits, and diasporic communities and how labor migration stimulated new social formations, political movements, and transregional connections that reshaped the modern world.
Chair:
Sheng Fei, Peking University
Presenters:
Bin Yang, City University of Hong Kong
Reena Goldthree, Yale University
Zou Kunyi, Chiang Mai University
Pedro Machado, Indiana University
Ryuto Shimada, University of Tokyo
Ming Zhu, East China Normal 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.
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Session #11 13:15-14:45
11A: Panel
Margins and Legacies of World War II as a Global War
Room 106
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Abstract:
​This panel asks what happens when we the Second World War by foregrounding perspectives that sit at the edges of empire, nation, and historical memory. Together, the papers trace how people far from the well-known narrative epicenters nonetheless experienced the war as an intimate, dislocating, and world-shaping event. One paper examines British efforts to mobilize West African troops for the Burma Campaign, revealing a web of contradictions: African soldiers trained for desert warfare but deployed to jungles; colonial racial hierarchies so rigid that exiled Polish officers were drafted to lead them; and a conflict imagined for the Sahara that unfolded in Southeast Asia. A second paper widens the lens across West Africa, showing how both soldiers and civilians encountered shifting imperial loyalties, coercive mobilization, and new political ideas that unsettled colonial authority. A third paper shifts to rural north China, where locust plagues, famine, and fractured occupation regimes forced communities into parallel wartime struggles largely absent from global narratives. The final microhistory follows three Polish-Jewish-South African brothers whose wartime service shaped their contested positions within apartheid’s racial order. Together, these papers illuminate WWII as a genuinely global war—one lived and interpreted from profoundly liminal and marginalized spaces.
Chair:
Heather Salter, Northeastern University
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Discussant:
Michele Louro, Salem State University
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Papers:
“The African Road to Burma: British Policy in Africa to 1943”
Roy Doron, Winston Salem State University
“The Gonski Brothers, the Holocaust and Apartheid”
Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University
“West Africans in WWII and WWII in West Africa”
John Williams, Colorado College
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11B: Panel
Frontiers of Anglo-Qing Relations in Transimperial Perspective
Room 105
Abstract:
This panel uses a transimperial (Hedinger and Née) framework to analyze the relationship between the British and Qing empires across distinct frontiers over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bilateral framing of the topic may seem to obviate the analytical purchase of “transimperial,” which draws attention to networks of multiple imperial formations and actors who operated at the interstices of empire. In fact, the papers illustrate that this relationship was never purely bilateral. Rather, it was conditioned by a diverse range of Qing, British, and other subjects acting on a complex range of localized interests that never neatly aligned with metropolitan concerns. Moreover, interactions with other imperial rivals, like Japan and Germany, and local polities shaped the Anglo-Qing relationship in different ways across these various “contact zones” (Pratt). Exploring this relationship across trans-Himalayan, littoral, and inland Chinese frontiers using disparate, multilingual archives underscores the fragmentary nature of this bilateral relationship. However, it also provides opportunities to observe how the inter-regional circulation of personnel and information shaped imperial agents’ negotiation of challenges that were simultaneously local and embedded in broader dynamics. Our papers pay particular attention to the development of strategies to, in turns, limit, harness, and stimulate commercial activity and assert jurisdictional claims over subjects. Rather than abandoning the bilateral framing of Anglo-Qing relations, we use a transimperial and multi-frontier framework to develop an understanding of this relationship rooted in these localities as opposed to London, Beijing, or the better-studied treaty ports.
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Chair:
Shellen Xiao Wu, Lehigh University
Papers:
“An Inner Trade War: The Chinese Junk Trade across the Qing and British Empires and Beyond in the Nineteenth Century”
Gary Chi-hung Luk, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
“Governing Yatung: Hybrid Frontier Bureaucracy and Trans-Himalayan Governance After the 1893 Anglo-Chinese Trade Regulations”
Lei Lin, Duke Kunshan University
“An Offer They Tried to Refuse: Twentieth-Century Counter-Imperialism in Inland North China”
Daniel Knorr, Illinois State University
“Dual Subjects and Dueling Sovereignties: Mobility and the Transimperial Origins of Nationality in East Asia (1895-1912)”
James Gerien-Chen, University of Florida
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11C: Panel
Sound, Stage, and Cultural Citizenship
Room 204
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Abstract:
This panel foregrounds sound, music, and theatrical performance as primary domains in which cultural identity is constituted, contested, and projected globally. Jiwon Kwon's analysis of K-pop's transnational sonic production traces how Korean popular music has become a vehicle for extraordinary global cultural flows, attending to the specific musical experimentation and production circuits that distinguish K-pop from other popular music industries. Paroma Ghose's paper situates K-pop at an apocalyptic cultural horizon, reading the genre's worldwide resonance against the backdrop of ecological and geopolitical crisis, asking what it means for Korean music to sound like "the end of the world." Sojung Kim's study of Changgeuk (the hybrid Korean dramatic form) examines how performative sound and theatrical genre cross conceptual borders when the form encounters French theatrical convention in Bonjour, Docteur Knock. Woojeong Choi's comparative paper on small theater movements in 1980s Korea and Japan illuminates how young women claimed cultural citizenship through performance during periods of political repression and social conservatism in both societies. Together, the papers propose that cultural performance is neither simply global entertainment nor only national heritage, but a dynamic site where aesthetic form, political history, and global audience converge.
Chair:
Olivia Bloechl, University of Pittsburgh
Papers:
“K-pop's Global Sonic Pathways: Transnational Production and Musical Experimentation in K-pop”
Jiwon Kwon, University of Pennsylvania
“Borderless Sonic: K-pop and the Sounds of the End of the World”
Paroma Ghose, Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History
“Rethinking Drama in Changgeuk: Conceptual Borders and Performative Sound in Bonjour, Docteur Knock”
Sojung Kim, Seoul National University
“Parallel Entanglements: Small Theater Practices and Cultural Citizenship of Young Women in 1980s Korea and Japan”
Woojeong Choi, Yonsei University
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11D: Panel
Diaspora, Migration, and Transnational Religious Networks
Room 304
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Abstract:
This panel brings together geographically and temporally diverse papers that share a concern with how communities form, maintain, and contest identity across distance and under constraint. Thanggoulen Kipgen's paper on the Kuki transborder community in Singapore examines how a Northeast Indian ethnic group uses diaspora networks to reconnect across the international borders that partition their ancestral homeland, positioning diaspora not as tragedy but as a bridge. Adam Knobler's paper on the Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian diaspora situates maritime dispersal as a constitutive world-historical process, arguing that the settlement of the Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds by Austronesian-speaking peoples represents one of the most consequential but underappreciated diasporas in human history. Hillel Eyal's paper on migrating women in the Spanish Atlantic during the post-colonial transition recovers the agency of women navigating a rapidly reconfiguring Atlantic world between roughly 1750 and 1850, challenging gendered assumptions about who migrated and why. Sarah Eltabib's paper on religious communities maintaining global networks in defiance of state restriction introduces the political dimension of networked belonging, arguing that communities of faith have historically been remarkable at sustaining connections across hostile state boundaries. Considered together, the papers argue that diaspora and migration are not exceptional conditions but defining features of human social life that states have consistently sought to control and communities have consistently found ways to circumvent.
Chair:
Jodie Marshall, Washington State University
Papers:
“Diaspora as Bridge: Borders, Migration and the Reconnected Kuki Transborder Community in Singapore”
Thanggoulen Kipgen, Indian Institute of Technology
“The Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian Diaspora in the Context of World History”
Adam Knobler, Ruhr Universität Bochum
“Migrating Women in the Spanish Atlantic: Obstacles and Access During the Post-Colonial Transition (c. 1750-1850)”
Hillel Eyal, Holon Institute of Technology
“Connected in Spite of You: Religious Communities, Ethical Leadership, and the Defiant Persistence of Global Networks Under State Restriction”
Sarah Eltabib, Adelphi University
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11E: Panel
Gender, Women's Bodies, and Colonial Encounters
Room 403
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Abstract:
This panel examines how gender and female bodies were contested, medicalized, commodified, suppressed, and represented across colonial Asia, asking how world historians can recover and center women's experience. Evamoni Deka’s paper on the medicalization of motherhood in colonial Assam traces how British colonial authority transformed traditional midwifery, bringing women's reproductive bodies under state and medical surveillance in ways that simultaneously displaced indigenous medical knowledge and restructured social hierarchies. Vaishali Gupta's paper on the representation of lesbianism in Indian English literature and film examines how non-normative female sexuality has been articulated and suppressed across cultural forms, tracing the conditions under which queer desire has been rendered visible or invisible in the Indian cultural imagination. Monica Ketchum-Cardenas's paper on weaving women into the Modern Asian History survey addresses the pedagogical challenge of centering women's experience in a field that has historically marginalized it, offering concrete strategies for curricular transformation. Together, the papers argue that gender is not a secondary variable in colonial and modern Asian history but a primary site where colonial power, racial order, and cultural norms have been negotiated, contested, and reproduced.
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Chair:
Corina González-Stout, Northwest Vista College
Papers:
“From Dhai to Doctor: Medicalising Motherhood and the Social History of Women's Reproductive Health in Colonial Assam”
Evamoni Deka, Independent Scholar
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“Representation of Lesbianism in Indian Culture: A Comparative Study of Select Indian English Novelists Characterization and Depiction in Indian Film”
Vaishali Gupta, Independent Scholar
“Weaving Women into Wars and Revolutions in the Modern Asian History Survey Class”
Monica Ketchum-Cardenas, Arizona Western College
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11F: Panel
Teaching the Pre-Modern World: Empires, Steppe Peoples, and Ancient Routes
Room 201
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Abstract:
This panel addresses the pedagogical and historiographical challenges of teaching pre-modern and ancient connectivity in world history classrooms, asking how educators and scholars frame cross-cultural contact, imperial power, and trade routes for students and general audiences. Sota Maruono's paper on teaching the Neo-Assyrian Empire as a case study in imperial connectivity without globalization invites instructors to distinguish carefully between pre-modern forms of inter-regional integration and the modern phenomenon of globalization, enriching the conceptual vocabulary available to world history teachers. Erik Hermans's paper on cross-cultural ethnography of the Eurasian steppe in Arabic, Greek, and Latin sources demonstrates how medieval observers deployed classical paradigms to make sense of unfamiliar peoples, revealing that cross-cultural description has always been mediated by inherited frameworks that simultaneously illuminate and distort. Rukhsana Iftikhar's paper on the Silk Road as a saga of cultural encounter in ancient India repositions India as an active participant in, rather than a passive recipient of, Silk Road exchange, recovering the agency of South Asian actors in ancient long-distance trade and cultural transfer. Together, the papers argue that pre-modern worlds and their pedagogical representation have urgent contemporary resonances that world history teachers cannot afford to ignore.
Chair:
Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh
Papers:
“Imperial Connectivity without Globalization: Teaching the Neo-Assyrian Empire”
Sota Maruono, Tokiwa University High School
“The Eurasian Steppe through Medieval Eyes and Classical Paradigms: Cross-Cultural Ethnography in Arabic, Greek, and Latin”
Erik Hermans, Villanova University
“Silk Road: The Saga of Cultural Encounter in Ancient India”
Rukhsana Iftikhar, University of Punjab
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11G: Panel
South Asia: Borders, Sovereignty, and Indigenous Identity
Room 208
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Abstract:
This panel examines borders, sovereignty, and identity in South Asia from the colonial period to the present, bringing together perspectives from Bengal, Bangladesh, Northeast India, and the Andaman-Nicobar Islands to construct a polycentric picture of South Asian spatial politics. Aksadul Alam's paper on the concept of Bengal and its borders explores how a historically fluid regional identity has been fragmented and reconstituted through the politics of partition, national boundary-making, and contested historical memory. A K M Khademul Haque's paper on decolonizing mosque preservation in Bangladesh examines how colonial heritage frameworks have shaped the preservation of Islamic architectural heritage, arguing that decolonization requires reimagining not only political structures but the very criteria by which the past is deemed worth preserving. Nikhil Kumar's paper on oral histories of border memory from India's Northeast traces how communities living at the margins of the nation-state narrate and experience the Indo-Myanmar frontier in an era characterized by increasing disconnection and geopolitical tension. Surabhi Baijal's paper on indigenous sovereignty and refusal in the Andaman-Nicobar Islands offers the argument that Indigenous communities' active choice to refuse engagement with globalization is itself a form of world-historical agency, not a failure to participate in modernity. Together, the papers propose that borders in South Asia are not merely political facts but lived and contested realities that communities navigate through memory, heritage, and deliberate acts of refusal.
Chair:
Laura J. Mitchell, University of California, Irvine
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Papers:
“The Concept of Bengal and Its Borders: (Dis)connected Histories and the Politics of Space and Identity”
Aksadul Alam, University of Dhaka
“Beyond the Monument: Decolonizing Mosque Preservation in Bangladesh”
A K M Khademul Haque, University of Dhaka
“Border Memories in an Age of Global Disconnection: Oral Histories from India's Northeast and the Geopolitics of the Indo-Myanmar Frontier”
Nikhil Kumar, Mohanlal Sukhadia University
“Refusal as World History: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Limits of Globalization in the Andaman-Nicobar”
Surabhi Baijal, Independent Scholar
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11H PANEL:
Southeast Asia: Empire, Commerce, and Legal Sovereignty
Room 302
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Abstract:
This panel examines Southeast Asia as a zone of imperial competition, commercial exchange, and contested legal order from the early modern to the interwar period. Christian Jones's paper on nationality law in the British Malay States examines how colonial legal frameworks struggled to define subjecthood in a plural society structured by overlapping claims of race, religion, and political authority, revealing the contingency of colonial legal categories. Masahiro Ikeda's paper on colonial rice market intervention and the anti-Chinese campaign in 1919 Southern Vietnam demonstrates how colonial economic policy was inseparable from ethnic politics, with Chinese merchants becoming targets of both colonial restriction and popular resentment. Maarten Jonker's paper on Dutch expatriate communities and cosmopolitan identity in Asian port cities explores how a relatively minor European imperial power maintained its sense of metropolitan identity at the margins of its own empire. Taken together, the papers argue that Southeast Asian history is constitutively a history of competing imperial projects whose legal, commercial, and cultural dimensions were always entangled.
Chair:
Matthew Bowser, Ohio Wesleyan University
Papers:
“Nationality Law in a British Protectorate? The Question of Subjecthood in the Malay States, c.1895-1942”
Christian Jones, Freie Universität Berlin
“Politics of the Rice Export Controls: The Colonial Market Intervention and the Anti-Chinese Campaign in 1919 Southern Vietnam”
Masahiro Ikeda, Okayama Shoka University
“Transimperial (Dis)connectivity in Asian Port Cities: Dutch Expatriate Communities and Cosmopolitan Dutchness Along the Asian Littoral, 1919-1941”
Maarten Jonker, London School of Economics and Political Science
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14:45-15:00
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #12 15:00-16:30
12A: Panel
Teaching and Learning Historical Perspective in Korean Middle School World History Classrooms: Curriculum Design and Analysis of Student Reasoning
Room 106
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Abstract:
This panel examines how historical perspective can be systematically designed, implemented, and analyzed in middle school world history classrooms in Korea. In an era of globalization, the ability to understand perspectives shaped by different historical contexts has become increasingly important. Although historical perspective is widely recognized as central to historical thinking, students often struggle to move beyond presentist or relativist interpretations.
We conceptualize historical perspective across three interrelated domains. Contemporaneous perspective refers to understanding how historical actors interpreted events within the social, political, and cultural conditions of their own time. Historiographical perspective concerns how later historians and interpreters construct differing accounts of the same event based on distinct questions, values, and evidentiary frameworks. Cross-temporal perspective involves comparing and synthesizing perspectives from different temporal positions, examining how interpretations shift across time.
Paper 1 presents the design principles of ten inquiry-based curriculum units built around widely used primary sources in Korean middle school textbooks. The materials articulate a staged progression across the three domains of perspective. Paper 2 analyzes 1,020 student responses generated through classroom implementation in ten schools, identifying patterns in students’ recognition and explanation of historical perspective. Paper 3 offers an in-depth analysis of cross-temporal perspective through close examination of students’ written conclusions on selected modern topics. Together, the panel clarifies the epistemic challenges of perspective learning and suggests instructional directions for world history education.
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Chair:
Robert B. Bain, University of Michigan
Papers:
“Designing Curriculum Materials for Historical Perspective Inquiry in Middle School World History”
Mimi Lee, Seoul National University
“Student Reasoning about Historical Perspective: Evidence from Curriculum-Based Inquiry in Korean Middle School World History”
Sumin Shin, Seoul National University
“Deepening the Analysis of Cross-Temporal Perspective: A Close Examination of Middle School Students’ Reasoning”
Sebin Cheon, Seoul National University
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12B: Panel
Vietnam: Borderlands, Revolutionary Propaganda, and Comparing of Coming of Age in Films on the Vietnam War and the Soviet War in Afghanistan
Room 204​
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Abstract:
Modern Vietnam has long been a venue for the discussion of world history themes and processes. Some of these, borderlands, local agency, colonialism, anti-colonialism, revolutions and art in the service of revolutionary propaganda, and the human cost of war are the subjects treated in the panel. Ha Trieu Huy’s paper is a close look at the political spaces that must be filled as imperial system decline and the prospects of local agency to secure autonomy. John Michael Swinbank extends his work on Vietnamese revolutionary poster art to offer a close examination of how Vietnam’s unique nationalist-anti-colonial revolutionary experience makes the transition to a globalizing world. Marc Jason Gilbert suggests how two films can provide students with insight into how coming of age during events during the American War in Vietnam and the Soviet War in Afghanistan led to transformative experiences though tests their humanity, their allegiances, and their views of the imperial “other.”
Chair:
Marc Jason Gilbert, Hawaii Pacific University
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Papers:
“Negotiating Autonomy on the Borderlands of a Fading Colonial Empire: the Establishment of Federations and the Dilemma of French Decolonization in Indochina (1950-1955)”
Huy Trieu Ha, Vietnam National University
“The Past That Will Not Pass: Vietnamese Propaganda Art and the Reanimation of National Unity in an Age of Fracturing Globalization”
John Michael Swinbank, Murdoch University
“Lost in Empires: A Comparative Approach to Teaching World History through the American War in Vietnam and the Soviet War in Afghanistan via Film”
Marc Jason Gilbert, Hawaii Pacific University
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12C: Panel
Imperial Logics and Economic Circuits: Africa in World History
Room 304
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Abstract:
How do imperial structures shape African engagement with global systems and how do those structures persist long after formal colonialism ends? This panel examines two moments in the longer history of Africa's encounter with colonial and neo-colonial power, tracing the mechanisms through which imperial logics are enforced, adapted, and reproduced across time. Seun Williams analyzes British colonial efforts to impose "more humane" European slaughter methods in Nigeria, arguing that humanitarian rhetoric served as a vehicle for extending colonial regulation of African animal husbandry and market practices, revealing how compassion itself became an instrument of imperial governance. Aluko Abayomi John examines the political economy of international remittances in the post-globalization era, demonstrating how contemporary financial mechanisms reproduce older patterns of economic dependency even as formal colonial structures have been dissolved. Read together, these papers reveal a connected argument: imperial logics do not disappear with decolonization. Rather, they are rerouted through new institutions, new discourses, and new financial circuits that continue to shape Africa's position in the global economy.
Chair:
Maximilian Georg, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Papers:
“Globalizing Colonial Compassion: British Colonizers and a More Humane Slaughter Method in Nigeria”
Seun Williams, University College Dublin
“Neocolonialism and the Political Economy of International Remittances in the Post-Globalization Era: Closed Borders and Global Connections”
Aluko Abayomi John, Redeemer's University
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12D: Panel
Korean Cinema, Media, and Social Transformation
Room 403
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Abstract:
This panel examines how Korean history and social life are mediated through film, literature, and digital technology in ways that reveal and reproduce inequalities of ethnicity, gender, and class. Qi Wang's paper on the criminalization of Korean Chinese in South Korean cinema investigates how film constructs ethnic hierarchies within Korean national identity, using the cinematic treatment of the Joseonjok as a window onto anxieties about migration and belonging in contemporary South Korea. Alice Wrigglesworth's paper on AI transcription and the Korean Memories Project introduces digital methodology into the panel, raising urgent questions about how machine learning technologies alter the preservation, interpretation, and accessibility of oral testimony. Sungshin Kim's paper on Ken Liu's science fiction novella The Man Who Ended History explores the philosophical stakes of owning and erasing historical memory, framing the fictional destruction of evidence of Unit 731's atrocities as a meditation on the competing claims of global ethics and national sovereignty over the past. Ashton Hwang's paper on the male loneliness epidemic and labor market transformation in South Korea grounds the panel's attention to media and narrative in the material conditions of late capitalist South Korean society. Together, the papers argue that representation, whether cinematic, digital, literary, or statistical, is always implicated in the power relations that shape how societies remember and forget.
Chair:
David McDonald, Bonham High School
Papers:
“The Criminalization of Korean Chinese in South Korean Cinema”
Qi Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology
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“Between Speech and Text: AI Transcription, Oral History, and the Korean Memories Project”
Alice Wrigglesworth, George Mason University Korea
Lynnette G. Leonard, George Mason University Korea
Mingyo Chu, George Mason University Korea
Dagyeong Lee, George Mason University Korea
“Who Owns the Past? Global vs. National Memory in Ken Liu's The Man Who Ended History”
Sungshin Kim, University of North Georgia
“Unpacking the Male Loneliness Epidemic in South Korea: A Story of Legal Reform and Labor Market Transformation”
Ashton Hwang, Independent Scholar
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12E: Panel
Soviet Power and Global Order: Statecraft, Geopolitics, and Imperial Memory from World War II to the Present
​Room 201
Abstract:
How did the Soviet state and its successor navigate international order across eight decades of war, Cold War competition, and post-Soviet reconfiguration? This panel traces a coherent arc from wartime statecraft through Cold War geopolitical calculation to post-Soviet imperial re-imagination, revealing how a single state repeatedly renegotiated its relationship with global institutions, energy markets, and historical memory. Marziye Mansoury opens the chronology by examining Iran's economic crisis management during World War II, showing how Iranian state capacity was tested and distorted by overlapping Soviet and British occupations, placing great-power competition at the center of wartime economic governance. Jun Fujisawa moves into the Cold War era, situating Soviet natural gas diplomacy within a multipolar framework involving West Germany, Japan, and Iran between 1965 and 1979, and demonstrating how the USSR wielded energy as a geopolitical instrument even in its relationships with non-aligned states. Severyan Dyakonov examines the Soviet Union's ambivalent engagement with international humanitarian organizations in the 1960s, revealing how the Soviet state navigated institutions it simultaneously needed for legitimacy and distrusted as instruments of Western influence. Malkhaz Saldadze brings the panel into the present, analyzing how the dissolution of the USSR generated imperial nostalgia and historical revisionism in post-Soviet Russian Eurasia, and how that revisionism directly informs Russia's contemporary geopolitical ambitions. Together, these papers reveal a persistent Soviet and Russian logic in which global integration tends to be strategic, international institutions remain objects of deep suspicion, and imperial memory proves repeatedly available for political mobilization.
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Chair:
Ian Abbey, Prairie View A&M University
Papers:
“Iran's Economic Crisis Management During World War II: An Analysis of Interventionist Policies and Their Consequences”
Marziye Mansoury, Alzahra University
“The Global Gas Game: The Soviet Union, West Germany, Japan, and the Politics of Iranian Natural Gas, 1965-1979”
Jun Fujisawa, Kobe University
“Bunch of Seasoned Intelligence Operatives and Spies: Soviets Ambivalent View of International Organizations — the League of Red Cross and FAO in the 1960s”
Severyan Dyakonov, University of Fribourg
“Revival of Imperialism and Correction of Historical Memories in Post-Soviet Russian Eurasia”
Malkhaz Saldadze, George Mason University Korea
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12F: Panel
South Asia: Colonial Economies, Labour, and the Politics of Knowledge
Room 208
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Abstract:
This panel examines South Asian history across a wide chronological range, from early medieval temple economies through colonial labor exploitation to the formation of postcolonial national identities, asking how South Asian societies have been simultaneously agents of their own histories and targets of external knowledge production. Supriya kumari's paper on monetization in early medieval Orissa, using the Lingaraja and Jagannatha Puri temples as case studies, establishes a deep baseline for South Asian economic institutions and their embeddedness in religious life, demonstrating that market exchange and sacred space were historically inseparable in the subcontinent. Pranav Vats's paper on Orientalism in Evelyn Wood's narrative of the 1857 Revolt examines how British colonial discourse constructed and managed the memory of anti-colonial resistance, showing that literary representation was an instrument of imperial knowledge production. Priyanka Neog's paper on the colonial roots of Assam's tea industry recovers the history of labor migration, indenture, and exploitation that undergirded one of Britain's most profitable colonial enterprises, centering the experiences of workers who have been invisible in most histories of the tea trade. Iram Ahmad's paper on Pakistan and Asia's connected histories argues for placing Pakistan within broader frameworks of intra-Asian connection rather than treating it as a peripheral case defined primarily by its relationship to India and Britain. Together, the papers insist that South Asian history is world history, constituted through long-distance connections, ideological projects, and labor regimes that were never merely local.
Chair:
Monica Ketchum-Cardenas, Arizona Western College
Papers:
“The Monetization Perspectives in Early Medieval Orissa: A Comparative Analysis of The Lingaraja and The Jagannatha Puri Temple”
Supriya Kumari, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi
“The Play of Orientalism in Evelyn Wood’s Narrative of the Revolt of 1857”
Pranav Vats, University of Delhi
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“Colonial Roots of Assam's Tea: A History of Labour Migration and Exploitation”
Priyanka Neog, Sonapur College (Autonomous)
“Global before Globalization: Pakistan and the Formation of Asia's Connected Histories”
Iram Ahmad, Forman Christian College
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12G: Panel
Building the Modern State: Law, Fiscal Power, Administration, and Soundscape in Japan and Comparative Perspective
Room 302
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Abstract:
What does it take to build a modern state and what does that process look like from the inside? This panel examines Japanese state formation and its consequences across four dimensions: international legal norms, fiscal coercion, administrative structure, and urban soundscape, situating Japan's modern transformation within comparative and transnational frameworks. Loughlin Sweeney opens by challenging Eurocentric accounts of international legal order, tracing how East Asian states participated in and shaped the development of international norms between 1860 and 1920, establishing the legal environment within which Japanese state power was constructed and contested. Shunsuke Nakaoka moves inside the state to examine the micro-politics of fiscal extraction, showing how Japan's early twentieth-century income tax law was implemented through regulatory infrastructure, confidential communications, and socio-economic pressure on targeted taxpayers. Baek Kwang Ryeol broadens the comparative frame, examining the formation of basic administrative units in Korea, Japan, and Europe to ask whether the structures that underpinned imperial governance shared features with their European counterparts and what those similarities and differences reveal about the universality of modern state formation. Jaehyeong Yu closes the panel at the level of lived experience, examining how industrializing states in Germany and Japan confronted the sensory disruptions of modernization around 1900 and attempted to govern urban sound in the name of public health and livelihood. Together, the papers reveal the modern state not as a finished structure but as an ongoing achievement; built through law, fiscal discipline, administrative experimentation, and the management of everyday life.
Chair:
Bin Yang, City University of Hong Kong
Papers:
“Origins of International Law in East Asia, 1860-1920: Towards a Global History of International Norms”
Loughlin Sweeney, Yonsei University
“Utilizing Enforced Regulations, Confidential Notices and Socio-economic Constraints Toward Targeted Payers — Implementation of the Japanese Income Tax Law in the Early 20th Century”
Shunsuke Nakaoka, Kobe University
“The Formation Process of Basic Administrative Units During the Formation of Modern States in Korea, Japan, and Europe”
Baek Kwang Ryeol, Seoul National University
“Maintaining Normalcy in a New Acoustic World: Noise, Livelihood, and Health in Germany and Japan around 1900”
Jaehyeong Yu, Vanderbilt University
Evening festivities 17:30-19:30
Closing Ceremony and Reception
TBD​
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Closing ceremony, featuring concluding remarks, announcement of special recognitions, closing keynote address on "The Global History of Ginseng" presented by Dr. Heasim Sul, Professor of History, Yonsei University, followed by a reception.
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