35th annual World History Association conference
Day 1: Thursday, June 25
8:00-8:30
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #1 8:30-10:00
1A: Panel
World History Education in South Korea: Curriculum, Textbooks, Assessment, and Scholarly Debates
Room 105
Abstract:
World history education in South Korea has undergone continuous revision, reflecting shifting historiographical paradigms, national priorities, and changing understandings of global interconnection. While curricular reforms have sought to address critiques of Eurocentrism and to incorporate approaches associated with New World History and global history, significant tensions remain between reform discourse and classroom practice. This panel investigates the current state and challenges of world history education in South Korea through four interconnected dimensions: national curriculum discourse, textbook narratives, high-stakes assessment, and scholarly debates shaping reform.
The first paper analyzes the normative goals embedded in national curriculum documents, identifying enduring tensions between “human history” and “today’s world.” The second paper investigates how high school textbooks construct global narratives, focusing on Eurocentrism and the distribution of historical agency. The third paper turns to assessment by examining eleven years of College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) items, revealing how high-stakes testing constrains the realization of global history ideals. The fourth paper situates these developments within broader scholarly debates, analyzing how researchers’ positionalities shape discourse on world history education in Korea.
Taken together, these studies show that world history education in South Korea operates at the intersection of global intellectual trends and national institutional structures. By integrating curriculum, textbook, assessment, and discourse analysis, the panel offers a comprehensive examination of how “the global” is conceptualized, institutionalized, and contested in world history. Korea’s experience offers a valuable case for international scholars seeking to understand how world history education is evolving within national education systems in a period shaped by new debates about globalization.
Chair:
Sun Joo Kang, Korean History Education Society
Papers:
“Tensions in the Goals of World History Education and the Meaning of World History: A Discourse Analysis of Korean Curriculum Documents”
Hanseok Ko (he/him), Seoul National University
“Being Global in World History Education: Eurocentrism and the Limits of Historical Actors in High School Textbooks”
Eun Kyung Shim (she/her), Seoul National University
“Assessing History in South Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test”
Mimi Lee (she/her), Seoul National University
Soeun Lee (she/her), Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation
“Researchers’ Positionality in World History Education: Debates and Issues in Korea”
Yongjun Park (he/him), Korea National University of Education
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1B: Workshop
More than Tribute: Foreign Relations in Early Modern East Asia
Room 204
Abstract:
Participants will learn about the complexities of foreign relations in early modern East Asia. World History textbooks and classes often erase the many voices in East Asia by implying that all regional powers sent tribute to China and simply accepted their hegemony. This presentation highlights the extensive interactions and negotiations that actually took place between China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in the 14th to 18th centuries. East Asia was a deeply integrated region, where all powers had independent agency and interests they pursued. Participants will also work through and discuss classroom-ready lessons for middle and high school world history students. The lessons were developed by teachers, in collaboration with scholars, and have been classroom-tested. The lessons highlight the foreign policy perspectives and tactics used by China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in the early modern period. Students, and participants in the workshop, work through primary sources to develop a more complex understanding of Early Modern East Asia.
Chair:
Eric Beckman, Independent Scholar
Presenters:
Eunjee Kang, San Lorenzo Unified School District
Bram Hubbell, Liberating Narratives
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1C: Innovative Session
The World in a Voice: Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and New Ways of Teaching Global
Room 304
Abstract:
This innovative session explores how oral history and digital storytelling can reshape the way students understand global history. When students listen closely to the stories of immigrants and refugees, they begin to see that the global is not a distant structure but something carried in memory, ritual, and the daily work of making a life in a new place. This session builds on practices modeled by the University of Arkansas TEXT Program and expands them into a digital humanities framework that supports high school students as they learn to work with narrative evidence and to represent it with care.
Participants will explore a pedagogy that treats oral testimony as a central source for understanding the movement of people and culture across borders. The session highlights classroom projects where students create digital exhibits, interactive maps, and annotated transcripts that allow them to see how global histories become visible through the details of a single voice. Examples from the Pho Minh Buddhist Temple oral history project will show how digital tools can help students notice the smaller forms of global connection found in family stories, religious spaces, and community practice.
The session invites participants to experiment with digital platforms and to consider questions of ethics, representation, and listening.
The goal is to offer a model for world history teaching that honors human experience and expands what counts as global knowledge. Through this work, oral history and digital humanities become a way to teach students that the global past is something that lives in people and continues to be shaped in the present.
Presenter:
Michael Fuhrman, The Wooster School, Harvard Divinity School
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1D: Panel
Oral History, Living Tradition, and Transnational Memory
Room 403
Abstract:
This panel brings together scholars who use oral history, living tradition, and community memory as both methodology and subject, recovering forms of historical knowledge that formal archives cannot capture. Dr. Kailash Chand Gurjar's paper on the transformation of oral history traditions in Rajasthan in the digital age examines how traditional forms of oral transmission are being altered — preserved and distorted simultaneously — under the pressure of new media technologies. Dr. Preetima Gogoi's paper on the living tradition of mask-making in Majuli, Assam, demonstrates how embodied religious and artistic practices constitute a form of material and performative historical knowledge that persists through ritual even as the surrounding social world changes. Dr Nikhil Kumar's paper on climate change and oral histories from the Indo-Myanmar borderlands shows how environmental memory is preserved and threatened in frontier communities, arguing that oral testimony about ecological change constitutes a crucial record that written archives and scientific datasets cannot replicate. Jacob Tropp's paper on anti-nuclear activist solidarities among Dine, Japanese, and Pacific Islander communities demonstrates that oral tradition and community memory were also political tools through which marginalized communities who bore the heaviest burdens of nuclear development built unexpected transnational coalitions. Together, the papers argue that oral and living traditions are not survivals from the past but active, adaptive, and politically significant forms of historical consciousness.
Chair:
Carey McCormack, George Mason University Korea
Papers:
“Oral History Traditions in India: Decline and Transformation in the Digital Age With Special Reference to Rajasthan”
Kailash Chand Gurjar, Central University of Haryana
“Changing Time, Enduring Faith: Locating the living tradition of Mask-Making in Majuli, North-East India”
Preetima Gogoi, Majuli University of Culture
“Vanishing Ecologies, Enduring Memories: Climate Change and Oral Histories from the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands”
Nikhil Kumar, Mohan Lal Sukhadia University
“Rethinking Global Anti-Nuclearism in the 1970s and 1980s: Activist Solidarities among Dine (Navajo), Japanese, and Pacific Islanders”
Jacob Tropp, Middlebury College
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1E: Panel
The Global Significance of the Imjin War (1592-1598)
Room 201
Abstract:
The Imjin War, also known as “The Japanese Calamity of 1592,” “The Rescue of Korea,” “The Glorious Conquest of Korea,” or “The East Asian War,” was the largest military conflict of the sixteenth-century in terms of the number of combatants, yet it still remains obscure outside of East Asia. This is despite the fact that the war was witnessed and chronicled by Western observers and its outcome had significant and far-reaching implications for the subsequent histories of all the major belligerents and indeed, for international trade in the region. It marked the most serious challenge to China’s international hegemony in East Asia prior to the nineteenth century and featured the integration and deployment of the latest military technologies from both the West and the belligerent states. Its memory continues to impact relations between China, Korea, and Japan in both the cultural and diplomatic realms. Bringing in primary sources from all the major participants and examining the impact of this war down to the present, the papers in this panel seek to redress this omission by focusing on several key facets of this seminal conflict, ranging from strategy and alliance building, to the production and dissemination of nautical knowledge, to the creation of extensive genealogies to document positive participation in saving the Korean state from destruction at the hands of the Japanese invaders. Together, the papers demonstrate the permeability of borders and boundaries of various kinds, helping to highlight the broader global significance of this war and suggests fruitful areas for future comparative research.
Chair:
Kenneth M. Swope, United States Naval War College
Papers:
“Nautical Knowledge, Field Surveys, and Mapmaking during the Imjin War”
Jing Liu, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
“Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Peripheral Players in The Imjin War”
Kizaki Braddick, Oxford University
“Transborder Migrations and the Reconstruction of Lineage: The Collective Memory of Post-Imjin Ming Diaspora in Korea”
Sangwoo Han, Ajou University
Byung-ho Lee, Ajou University
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1F Panel:
Global Capitalism, Trade, and Commercial Infrastructure
Room 208
Abstract:
This panel approaches global economic history through the lens of commodity flows, commercial intermediaries, fiscal architecture, and the physical infrastructure of trade. David Eaton's paper on globalization and cheap things examines how the production and worldwide circulation of inexpensive consumer goods has been a constitutive and undertheorized dimension of modern globalization, challenging narratives that center high-value commodities. Toshiaki Tamaki's paper on commission capitalism and commercial intermediation theorizes the structural role of brokers, agents, and commission houses in connecting distant markets, arguing that the architecture of intermediation is as important to understanding world trade as commodity flows themselves. Sundara Vadlamudi's paper on intra-Asian tariff regimes and duty-free ports during South Asia's colonial transition reveals how fiscal infrastructure shaped and distorted the patterns of Asian commerce, privileging colonial firms while disadvantaging indigenous merchants. Matthew Evenden's paper on iron ballast in the late age of sail recovers an overlooked material dimension of oceanic commerce — the enormous quantities of iron required simply to ballast sailing ships — as a window into the supply chains and port economies that undergirded global trade between 1700 and 1800. Together, the papers propose that the global economy is held together not only by capital and commodities but by the mundane infrastructures, intermediaries, material objects, and fiscal regulations that make long-distance exchange possible and profitable.
Chair: Thomas W. Bottelier, Utrecht University
Papers:
“Globalization and Cheap Things”
David Eaton, Grand Valley State University
“Commission Capitalism and Global Connections: Intermediation, Infrastructure, and the Making of the Modern World Economy”
Toshiaki Tamaki, Kyoto Sangyo University
“Inland Tariffs, Port Duties, and Duty-Free Ports: Intra-Asian Trade during South Asia's Colonial Transition”
Sundara Vadlamudi, American University of Sharjah
“Kentledge: Iron Ballast in the Late Age of Sail, 1700-1800”
Matthew Evenden, University of British Columbia
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1G: WORKSHOP
Maps as Sources and Methods in World History
Room 302
Presenter:
Maximilian Georg, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Abstract:
As history unfolds in space, maps depict certain historical situations and processes, particularly of an international or global scale, more clearly than words can. Therefore, maps hold great potential both as sources of (world) history and as methods to analyze and represent it. Nevertheless, some academic traditions regard maps as the purview of geographers rather than of historians, and many world history publications include barely any or no maps. Moreover, it takes specific knowledge to interpret historical maps, and specific skills to create a useful map that is not misleading or purely decorative. Digital tools have of course made cartography easier, but now we must learn how to choose and use them well. This workshop aims to raise awareness of maps in world history, and connect colleagues with and without cartographic experience. We will discuss the status of maps, their advantages as well as challenges, and how we may find and/or create maps for our own research. After a brief general input from the organizer, participants are invited to share their cartographic practices, opinions, ideas and requirements. As the conference is taking place in Korea, we should also consider cartographic traditions other than the dominant Western one. Finally, the workshop will introduce some free online collections of historical maps such as David Rumsey's, and free cartographic software such as QGIS and Historical Mapchart. Time permitting, we may sketch some sample maps with these tools, based on thematic suggestions from participants.
10:00-10:15
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #2 10:15-11:45
2B: Meet the Authors
Room 304
Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain (2019) and Thatcher’ Cold War: The Battle of Ideas (2026)
Author:
Paul Corthorn, Queen's University Belfast
Abstract:
Paul Corthorn will reflect on my experience of writing two related books on the prominent late twentieth-century British Conservative politicians Enoch Powell (1912-98), who set the political agenda, and Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), who was UK Prime Minister for over 11 years. The books grapple with one of the conference’s main themes: understanding the historical precedents of a connected but not globalized world by examining two figures whose political careers were spent in the shadow of the Cold War.
Amid divisions between East and West from the mid-1940s, Corthorn will discuss Powell and Thatcher’s evolving (and distinct) viewpoints on: the British Empire and Commonwealth; relations with the United States and the Soviet Union; nuclear weapons; neoliberalism (pitting economic and political freedom against centralized state control); and UK membership of the European Community. In each area, the arguments advanced by Powell and Thatcher were shaped, in different ways, by commitments to the British nation, which characterized their Conservatism. Corthorn will reflect on methodology, in particular his concern to take seriously the ideas of politicians (and the speeches through which they articulated them) and to place them firmly in their domestic and international political context. Corthorn will give prominence to Asia, ranging from Powell’s experiences in India in the 1940s through to Thatcher’s views of Chinese (and as opposed to Soviet) Communism and to her suggestion, in the mid-1980s, that South Korea engage more with North Korea (following her example of building contacts with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe).
Containing Decolonisation: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (2025)
Author:
Matthew Bowser, Ohio Wesleyan University
Abstract:
At the end of World War II, the European empires found themselves in terminal decline, facing both domestic devastation and powerful anti-colonial movements. Bowser's research on the British Empire in Southeast Asia has found that British officials planned for their retreat by selecting “reasonable parties” that would serve their two key interests: maintaining the extractive capitalist market and ensuring a continued British geo-strategic presence. In a comparative study between Burma and Malaya between 1945 and 1948, Bowser's recently-published work has found that, in both cases, colonial officials preferred anti-immigrant ethnonationalist parties. The Myochit Party in Burma and the United Malays National Organization in Malaya both promoted the “immigrant problem” as the foremost issue. Both demonstrated that neither had any interest in reforming extractive capitalism or even in resisting British influence, but simply in replacing the British at the top of the political and economic hierarchy in their countries. Therefore, these parties could retain existing structures while harnessing revolutionary energy into persecuting scapegoats. Bowser's research’s intervention is to use the framework of passive revolution to explain why ethnonationalism has been the most successful form of anti-communism in the twentieth century, and to make progress toward explaining its worldwide prevalence today. In presenting this work, he will also explore ways in which this strategy was more global by citing similar British policies in India, in Ceylon, and in Mandatory Palestine. These last three cases will be pointing toward future research, and hopefully will invite feedback from the audience.
Containing Decolonisation: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (2025)
Author:
Matthew Bowser, Ohio Wesleyan University
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2C: Panel
Korea under Empire: Colonial Economy, Sport, Animals, and Social Control
Room 403
Abstract:
This panel examines the multiple registers through which Japanese imperial power shaped and was shaped by Korean society, from deep economic structures to the everyday worlds of sport, animals, and prestige objects. Wonkyoo Lee's study of Seoul's urban economy establishes the structural logic of colonial dependence, showing how Japanese capital organized the peninsula's principal city as a site of extraction and controlled growth. Michael Delphia's paper on the 1923 Whimoon High School baseball tournament shifts scale to a single dramatic event, revealing how Korean athletes and media navigated imperial cultural expectations through sport. Minju Kwon and Jeeye Song's paper on Japan's imperial governance over animals extends the colonial gaze to non-human actors, demonstrating that the administrative reach of empire encompassed living creatures whose management served both ideological and economic purposes. P. Codi Shoemaker's paper on prehistoric burial pottery along Korea's southern coast grounds the panel in the longue durée of Korean social history, contextualizing later colonial interventions against an indigenous tradition of prestige signaling that long predated Japanese rule. Together, the papers advance a multidimensional view of colonial Korea that refuses to reduce imperial history to either political economy or cultural resistance alone.
Chair:
Anne Gedacht, Seton Hall University
Papers:
“Growth through Dependence: The Urban Economy of Seoul under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1923-1939”
Wonkyoo Lee, University of Pennsylvania
“Baseball in Colonial Korea: Whimoon High School's 1923 Tournament Run and Media Identities Under Empire”
Michael Delphia, Peking University
“Colonized Non-humans: Japan's Imperial Governance over Animals”
Minju Kwon, Chapman University
Jeeye Song, Korea University
“Pottery and Prestige: Socio-Economic Signaling in Prehistoric Burial Rituals along Korea's Southern Coast”
P. Codi Shoemaker, Lindenwood University
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2D: Panel
Korea's Global Connections: Internationalism, Religion, and Diplomacy
Room 201
Abstract:
This panel traces Korea's engagement with international networks across nearly a century and a half, asking what global connection has meant for the peninsula at different historical moments. Jung Jong-won's paper on Korea's liberal internationalism in the late nineteenth century opens the arc by examining the optimism and subsequent disillusionment of Korea's early encounter with a Western-led world order. Hyangsoon Yi's paper on religious networks involving figures such as Elizabeth Anna Gordon and Timothy Richard shows how transnational Protestant activism brought Korea into global circuits of spiritual and intellectual exchange before formal internationalist frameworks existed. Khemara Chhorn's study of Qatar's cultural diplomacy with South Korea and other East Asian states demonstrates that in the twenty-first century, small states are actively reshaping global connections by cultivating cultural ties across regions. Kumar Roshan Dusad's paper on India-South Korea bilateral connections in a post-globalization era examines how states maintain robust ties when overarching global frameworks contract. Together, these papers construct a comparative and longitudinal account of how Korea has navigated shifting international orders, from nineteenth-century imperialism to contemporary geopolitical fragmentation.
Chair:
Andrew Wender, University of Victoria
Papers:
“Korea's Liberal Internationalism in the Late Nineteenth Century: Global Connections and Disillusionment”
Jong Won Jung, Hanyang University
“Religious Globality Before Globalization: Elizabeth Anna Gordon, Timothy Richard, and Korea”
Hyangsoon Yi, University of Georgia
“Small State, Strategic Culture: Qatar's Cultural Diplomacy with China, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia after the Gulf Crisis”
Khemara Chhorn, University of Manchester
“Navigating Closed Borders: Sustaining Global Connections between India and South Korea in Post-Globalization Era”
Kumar Roshan Dusad, University of Science and Technology, Meghalaya
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2E: Panel
Botanical Commodities, Water, and Imperial Circuits
Room 208
Abstract:
This panel examines how plants, water, and environmental knowledge moved through imperial and capitalist circuits, transforming ecologies, economies, bodies, and borderlands across the modern world. Carey McCormack’s paper on Indigenous expertise and Spanish bioprospecting in the Pacific interrogates how colonial powers extracted botanical knowledge from Indigenous communities and incorporated it into imperial science, raising questions about knowledge sovereignty and the ethics of bioprospecting that remain urgent today. Qiao Yu’s paper on the global odyssey of eucalyptus, macadamia, and kiwifruit traces how the deliberate transplantation of plant species remade Pacific and antipodean environments in ways that were simultaneously scientifically intentional and ecologically unpredictable. Yiyun Huang’s paper on Chinese tea in early modern European medicine reveals how a commodity became a site of medical controversy as it moved across cultural and epistemic boundaries, being variously celebrated as a universal panacea and condemned as a dangerous foreign drug. Eric Boime’s paper on the “resurrection” of the Colorado River reframes the delta as an “irrigated borderland” whose exploitation and attempted restoration expose the entanglement of neoliberal environmentalism, binational water policy, and export-led growth in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Together, the papers argue that plants and waterscapes are active agents, along with the knowledge, capital, and taste regimes attached to them, in the making of imperial capitalism, environmental transformation, and cross-cultural encounter.
Chair:
Cynthia Ross, East Texas A&M University
Papers:
“Circulating Botanical Knowledge: Indigenous Expertise and Pacific Bioprospecting in the Early Nineteenth-Century Spanish Empire”
Carey McCormack, George Mason University Korea
“Transforming the Pacific: The Global Odyssey of Eucalyptus, Macadamia, and Kiwifruit (19th-20th Century)”
Qiao Yu, Capital Normal University
“Panacea or pernicious drug: Situating Chinese Tea in Early Modern European Medicine”
Yiyun Huang, Wuhan University
“The "Resurrection" of the Colorado River: Neoliberal Environmentalism in the ‘Irrigated Borderlands’”
Eric Boime, San Diego State University
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2F: Workshop
Reimagining History Assignments: Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking
Room 302
Abstract:
This interactive, hands-on workshop invites participants to explore innovative assignment designs that promote student creativity, collaborative learning, and critical thinking in the history classroom. The facilitator will introduce a series of classroom-tested assignments that deepen historical understanding while encouraging students to imagine, interpret, and create. Following these demonstrations, participants will engage in guided design time, developing at least one new classroom-ready assignment or activity tailored to their own teaching needs. The session concludes with a sharing period to exchange ideas and adaptable strategies.
Presenter:
Masako Racel, Kennesaw State 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.
Session #3 13:15-14:45
3A: Panel
Macao in World History
Room 106
Abstract:
Hong Kong, since the first Opium War (1839-42), as the East-West center, has been well-known across the world, while much fewer people have realized that Macao had been the first European base in East Asia from the mid-16th century to the 1840s and onward. This panel thus aims to bring attention to Macao by examining its rich and diverse history through a few case studies. The first paper focuses on the rich and diverse sources concerning Macao created by various agents, including the Portuguese Empire, the Roman Catholic mission in Asia, and Chinese authorities, and raises the question of whether these sources present different narratives of Macao’s past or contribute to a cohesive understanding of its history. The second paper turns to both Chinese and Portuguese texts to examine the 1749 homicide of two Chinese men by Portuguese soldiers at Macao and illustrates that Macao was a vital nexus connecting local, regional, and global processes in the early modern world. The third paper pays attention to the “oriental” paintings of Macao created by European artists, and discusses how pictorial Macao played a significant role in creating, circulating, and reproducing “Chinese knowledge” in the West. The last paper in the panel, based on solid archives and oral history, examines the return of Burmese Chinese to Portuguese-administered Macau from the 1950s to the 1980s, thus shedding some new light on the dynamic role of Macao in the Cold War politics.
Chair:
Bin Yang, City University of Hong Kong
Papers:
“Archival Sources in the Making of Macao’s History”
Jacqueline Jingzhen Xie, University of Macao
“From the Twelve-Article Convention (1749) to the Last Portuguese Embassy (1752): Macao at the Crossroads of East-West Relations”
Chunhui Lu, University of Macao
“Making the Orient: The Circulation, Imagination and Transformation of Mid-19th Century Macau Images in Europe”
Ka Nok Lo, University of Macao
“To the Promised Land: Burmese Chinese Re-Migration to Cold War Macau”
Fang Xiang, The Macau University of Science and Technology
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3B: Panel
History for the Twenty-First Century (H/21): New Materials for Rethinking the World History Survey Course
Room 105
Abstract:
The H/21 Project (History for the Twenty-First Century) is a collaborative project of the World History Association, which seeks to rethink world history curricula by designing inquiry-based and student-centered lessons on critical topics in world history. The goal of this project is to support college and university faculty by offering open-access instructional materials, which include curated lessons with primary sources, instructor guides, and classroom activities. On this panel, three H/21 authors will discuss their new modules: Trevor Getz presentation explores a “Big History” module that aims to provide students with a mental map of four critical eras in our shared human history, while also strengthening skills in synthesis and historical empathy. Jodie Marshall will present a module in which students explore the early modern Indian Ocean as a space, connected through imperial ambition, trade, and human movement. Brenna Miller’s presentation will address teaching the history of shifting identities in Southeastern Europe, from imperial collapse, the rise of nationalism, war, and the Cold War. All of these papers offer a discussion of interactive, student-centered pedagogical strategies.
Chair:
Brenna Miller, History for the 21st Century & Washington State University
Papers:
“Your Place in the World”
Trevor Getz, San Francisco State University
“Traveling the Early Modern Indian Ocean”
Jodie Marshall, Washington State University
“Identity from Empire, to Nation, and Beyond in Southeastern Europe”
Brenna Miller, History for the 21st Century & Washington State University
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3C: Panel
War and Its Afterlives: Memory, Testimony, and Displacement
Room 204
Abstract:
This panel examines how the violence and unresolved legacies of war continue to generate forms of displacement, testimony, and political manipulation in Korea and other national contexts. Eliam Weinstock's paper on the temporal erasure of the Korean War interrogates the mechanisms by which the conflict has been rendered invisible in global historical consciousness, positioning forgetting as an active political strategy. Narantuya Danzan's research on Korean War orphans in Mongolia uncovers a transnational human consequence of the war that has received almost no scholarly attention, complicating the assumption that the war's humanitarian fallout was contained within the Korean peninsula. Dr. Marcy Tanter's paper on comfort women testimony and its intersection with visual art raises fundamental questions about how survivors of wartime sexual violence narrate and aestheticize traumatic experience at the boundary of the speakable. Together, these papers argue that long after its conclusion, war remains an unfinished historical event whose human consequences, whether suppressed, scattered, or contested, continue to animate both scholarly and political life.
Chair:
Jacob Tropp, Middlebury College
Papers:
“Firefighting Arsonists: The Temporal Erasure of the Korean War”
Eliam Weinstock, San Francisco State University
“Korean War Orphans in Mongolia”
Narantuya Danzan, Mongolian Academy of Sciences
“’I was chosen because I was beautiful’: Intersections of Comfort Women Testimony and Art”
Marcy Tanter, Ranger College
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3D: Panel
Global Music History in Asia and Beyond
Room 304
Abstract:
This panel brings together four papers based on chapters in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music History, which explores the potential for doing music history otherwise offered by a globally oriented perspective. There is no consensus on what the emerging trans-discipline of global music history comprises, what its main methodologies are, or even where its disciplinary boundaries lie. Yet it has become a significant, even transformative development in music studies. A critical mass of research is showing that some of the most important changes in how peoples have created and conceptualized music stemmed from large-scale connective processes that reconfigured their lived musical worlds.
In honor of the conference theme and location, each of in the papers in this panel addresses cross-border music histories and present-day perspectives involving Asia or the Pacific in some significant respect. Sarah Finley analyzes scenes of indigenous Mexican festive music-making on a late-1600s Japanese-New Spanish folding screen from an oceanic perspective that yields a more nuanced understanding of creole elites’ cosmopolitanism. Turning to the eighteenth century, Olivia Bloechl discusses comparisons of Anishinaabe, Tahitian, and Chinese Indonesian recitational singing with French operatic recitative in Bougainville’s Atlantic and Pacific writings, and argues that comparative accounts like these can be critically and creatively interpreted as contested sound worlding. The last two papers center on music in present-day Southeast and East Asian contexts. Buenconsejo’s paper makes the case for renewed attention to shared dimensions of divergent, even incommensurable music cultures, discussing indigenous Philippine instruments as objects in which universals and cultural particularity converge. Finally, Hedy Law points to the agency of Cantonese music creators in facilitating connections among listeners within and outside Hong Kong and offering meaningful frameworks for making sense of the 2020 National Security Law’ s global reach.
Chair:
Olivia Bloechl, University of Pittsburgh
Papers:
“Sounding Indigenous Music from Early Modern Mexico City: A Global Approach to Biombo con desposorio indígena, mitote y palo volador (c. 1690)”
Sarah Finley, Christopher Newport University
“Worlding through Recitational Song in Louis-Antoine Bougainville’s North American and Pacific Writings”
Olivia Bloechl, University of Pittsburgh
“A Convergent Vision for a New Science of Global Music History: The Case of Indigenous Philippine Bamboo Flute and Zither Music”
José S. Buenconsejo, University of the Philippines
“After the Global Hush: Reconfiguring the Present through Time Travel in Journey of Spirits (魂遊記) (2021)”
Hedy Law, University of British Columbia
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3E: Roundtable
Late Victorian Holocausts Revisited
Room 403
Abstract:
In 2000, Mike Davis published the now classic work, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. The book’s main argument, that colonial policies exacerbated the effects of global climate patterns and led to the excess death of millions of people in late nineteenth century famines, stirred debate and ultimately led to the reassessment of colonialism’s lasting impact on the Global South. Ruth Mostern, Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh), Nadin Heé, Daniel Hedinger (Leipzig University), and Shellen Wu (Lehigh University) will conduct a roundtable panel on the use of AI to read nineteenth century large-scale weather data and archival materials at scale to reexamine the famines that arose from the 1877 El Niño. We would like to revisit Mike Davis’ arguments in Victorian Holocaust with empirical evidence that new technological developments now make possible. Focusing on a crucial period in the late nineteenth century - for the rise of meteorological sciences, instrumentation, and global networks for the collection of data, we will share strategies, methodologies, and tools for using AI and other digital tools for large scale historical research. This panel brings together a range of fields that are rarely articulated at once: world history and the history of empire, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and digital methods for history.
Chair:
Ruth Mostern, University of Pittsburgh
Presenters:
Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh
Shellen Wu, Lehigh University
Nadin Heé, University of Leipzig
Daniel Hedinger, University of Leipzig
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3F: Panel
Cold War Mobilities: Reconfiguring People, Technology, and Capital in the Making of South Korea
Room 201
Abstract:
This session explores how U.S. aid and transnational mobility reshaped South Korea’s institutions, infrastructures, and state formation from the 1950s to the 1970s. Moving beyond a state-centric diplomatic narrative, the panel approaches aid as a multidirectional process involving the circulation and appropriation of people, knowledge, technology, and financial models across Cold War East Asia.
The papers shed light on different dimensions of these mobilities. One analyzes the contested movement of Zainichi Koreans in Japan, highlighting how repatriation and border control regimes exposed the tensions between mobility and sovereignty. Another explores the reconstruction of the Seoul-Busan highway, showing how military-led infrastructure projects facilitated the transfer of technical expertise and the growth of civilian engineering capacity. A third investigates the establishment of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS), demonstrating how American technical assistance was selectively appropriated to institutionalize scientific expertise and consolidate a developmental state. The final paper considers U.S. aid officials’ perceptions of traditional rotating credit associations (kye) and their relationship to agricultural cooperatives, revealing how local financial practices were reconfigured within broader development frameworks.
Together, these studies question the assumption that the South Korean developmental state emerged from domestic initiative or American imposition to emphasize complex negotiations within Cold War transnational networks. By foregrounding mobility and institutional transformation, this session attempts to situate Korean history within wider debates in Cold War studies, development history, and global history.\
Chair:
Seung Woo Kim, Hanyang University
Papers:
“Modernizing and Masculinizing the Nation through Cold War Technological Aid and Appropriation: KIST, KAIS, and Technological Elites in South Korea (1960s-70s)”
Wonkeun Lee, Sogang University
“Sealed Cross-Border Mobility and Everyday State Violence: Zainichi Koreans’ Demands for free movement to North Korea in the 1960s”
Minchang Jeon, Hanyang University
“Roadway to Renaissance: The Road Construction from Seoul to Pusan in 1950s ―Focusing on the America’s Technical Training and the Changes of Korean Engineers”
Jae Won Na, Hanyang University
“U.S. Aid Authorities’ Perceptions and Responses to Traditional Financial Systems in 1950s East Asia: From ROSCAs to Cooperatives”
Taehyun Kim, Hanyang University
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3G: Panel
Food, Material Culture, and Everyday Global Life
Room 208
Abstract:
This panel explores how everyday objects, domestic practices, culinary traditions, and sacred spaces carry historical meaning and mediate cultural exchange across the global world. Olaolu Peter Oluwasanmi's paper on food as a living archive argues that culinary practices preserve diaspora memory in forms that resist official historical narratives, treating the kitchen as an archive where identity, loss, and longing are reproduced with every meal. Muhammed Riyasudheen O K's paper on dishwashing practices in pre-synthetic Kerala situates domestic ecology within the longue durée of material culture, showing how the apparently trivial routines of household life encode environmental resources, social relations, and technological histories. Joshua Dao-Wei Sim's paper on the electric fan in Singapore makes the mundane technology of household heat management a lens for global history, tracing how a simple device shaped tropical domestic life across six decades of postcolonial Singapore's development. Together, the papers argue that world history is also a history of the domestic, the everyday, and the material — dimensions of human life that political and economic narratives have too often neglected.
Chair:
Grace Chee, LACCD East & West
Papers:
“Food as a Living Archive: Culinary Memory and the Politics of Diaspora Identity”
Olaolu Peter Oluwasanmi, Durban University of Technology
“Fan-mediated Tropical Beings: A World History of Electric Fan Usage in Singapore's Household Heat Management, 1960s to the Present”
Joshua Dao-Wei Sim, National University of Singapore
“Ecology and Domestic Culture: A Comparative Study of Dishwashing Practices in Pre-synthetic era of Kerala and India”
Muhammed Riyasudheen O K, Sree Narayana Guru Open University
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3H: Panel
State Power, Information Control, and Border Sovereignty
Room 302
Abstract:
This panel examines how states construct and defend political order by manipulating information, controlling borders, and policing the boundaries of belonging, from early modern East Asia to the digital disinformation environment of the 2020s. Wenxu Zhang’s paper on the Southern Crisis of the Tianxia cosmological order during the Ha Tien conflict of 1767–1771 situates mainland Southeast Asian geopolitics within a broader Chinese imperial framework, showing how local conflict could destabilize an expansive imagined order and force a rethinking of regional hierarchy and sovereignty. Marziye Mansoury’s paper on the paradox of state monopoly and wartime shortages in occupied Iran between 1941 and 1946 reveals how efforts to centralize economic control during crisis produced the very scarcities they aimed to prevent, illuminating the limits and unintended consequences of state power. Alek Barovic’s paper on historical revisionism and the collapse of globalist narratives in the post‑Yugoslav space demonstrates how closed borders and constrained information environments allow national governments to rewrite the past in service of exclusionary projects. Chris Kostov’s paper on Russian disinformation and the end of global trust brings these questions into the twenty‑first century, analyzing how post‑Soviet Russia has weaponized digital media to undermine shared factual baselines and weaken transnational civil society. Together, the papers trace a long arc in which states deploy territorial, economic, and informational tools to secure authority and reveal how those same tools can generate crisis, contestation, and reorder worlds.
Chair:
Jennifer Hart, Virginia Tech
Papers:
“The Southern Crisis of Tianxia: Ha Tien and the Reordering of Mainland Southeast Asia (1767-1771)”
Wenxu Zhang, Beijing Normal University
“Closed Borders, Closed Economies: The Paradox of State Monopoly and Wartime Shortages in Occupied Iran, 1941-1946”
Marziye Mansoury, Alzahra University
“Rewriting the Past Behind Closed Borders: Historical Revisionism and the Collapse of Globalist Narratives in the Post-Yugoslav Space”
Alek Barovic, University of Padova
“Propaganda without Borders: Russian Disinformation and the End of Global Trust”
Chris Kostov, Universidad Instituto de Empresa
14:45-15:00
Coffee break / Informal gathering
Location: Matz Hall
Session #4 15:00-16:30
4A: Panel
Cross-Border Encounters, Entanglements and Comparisons between China and the West: Concepts, Imaginaries, Practices
Room 106
Abstract:
This panel examines cross-border encounters, entanglements, and comparisons between China and the West from historical, conceptual, and social perspectives. Bringing together research in intellectual history, comparative politics, global history, art history, and migration studies, the panel explores how ideas, institutions, and practices have circulated across different regions and periods. The papers address the cross-cultural interpretations of the ancient Chinese “Chaogong” in Western scholarship and reflects on the concept of the “tribute system”, contrasting trajectories of nation-building in China and the Balkans, mutual learning between China and Yugoslavia, the exhibition of Chinese art through UNESCO during the Cold War, and Chinese migration to Italy in relation to labor, family, and community formation. Taken together, the panel highlights the interconnected and relational character of China–West interactions, and shows how comparison, exchange, and mutual perception have shaped broader historical processes across political, cultural, and social domains.
Chair:
Zhou Yuguang, Capital Normal University
Discussant:
Liu Wenming, Capital Normal University
Papers:
“The Concept of the “Tribute System:” A Reflection from a Cross-Cultural Comparative Perspective Between China and the West”
Liu Wenming, Capital Normal University
“Aggregation and Separation: Nation-building in China and the Balkans in the Early 20th Century”
Zhu Pengfei, Capital Normal University
“Mutual Mirroring: How China and Yugoslavia Learned from Each Other”
Zhou Yuguang, Capital Normal University
“From Uniqueness to Connectivity: The Communication and Exhibition of Chinese Art via UNESCO during the High Cold War Period”
Chen Yarong, Capital Normal University
“Chinese Migration to Italy in Historical-Sociological Perspective: Family, Labor, and Community Formation”
Tan Yingxin, Capital Normal University
_______
4B: Panel
Reframing Korea in World History: From Textbook Narratives to Classroom Practices
Room 105
Abstract:
How is Korea’s historical agency negotiated between textbook narratives and classroom practice? This panel examines the tensions between official representations of Korea in world history curricula and their interpretation in educational settings in the United States and South Korea. Kenneth R. Curtis opens by reflecting on decades of engagement with U.S. “history wars,” highlighting the structural constraints that have shaped Korea’s marginal position within Western-centered state standards. Mimi Lee shifts the focus to teacher agency, drawing on empirical research to show how educators actively interpret, adapt, and at times resist narratives of “the other” in order to connect historical narratives to students’ present lives. Finally, Dahee Kim identifies persistent gaps between academic scholarship and classroom content, presenting cases of collaboration with global publishers to reposition Korea as an active and independent agent in world history.
Together, these presentations show that reframing Korea requires more than revising textbook narratives; it demands sustained attention to teacher professional learning and institutional partnerships that bridge the divide between scholarship and classroom practice.
Chair:
Kenneth R. Curtis, California State University Long Beach
Papers:
“Korea in World History, Revisited”
Kenneth R. Curtis, California State University Long Beach
“Between the Textbook and the Classroom: How History Teachers Navigate Textbook Narratives in Korea and the United States”
Mimi Lee, Seoul National University
“Reframing Korea in U.S. Textbooks: Narrative Trends and Enhancements”
Dahee Kim, The Academy of Korean Studies
_______
4C: Panel
War as Vector: Military and Economic Globalization in Asia, 1914–1945
Room 204
Abstract:
This panel argues that the world wars in Asia were not interruptions to global integration but zones of contact that generated new forms of cross-border connectivity. While recent scholarship in military and international history has begun to explore war-generated globalization, this work has not yet been brought into sustained conversation with world history. This panel bridges that gap, examining how conflict produced transnational exchanges of ideas, practices, and material across Asia—often between states simultaneously closing their borders to peacetime commerce.
Loughlin Sweeney traces how interactions between British, Indian, Japanese, Ottoman, and American officers during the First World War transformed military culture. Encounters in Asia forced a reckoning with competing models of professionalization, as officers learned not only from allies but from enemies, accelerating the shift from "gallantry" to "efficiency" as an organizing principle. Thomas Bottelier reexamines inter-Allied economic aid during the Second World War, arguing that alliances functioned as incubators of new international relationships rather than mere coalitions of convenience. United States aid to China, routed through British India, reveals multilateral networks of exchange operating within wartime blocs that complicate the image of the 1940s as a nadir of globalization. Chad Denton shows how Japan's metal requisition programs were modeled on German precedents from both world wars, with propaganda featuring Nazi parallels to justify the requisition of household objects, shrine bells, and bronze statues across Japan's empire.
Together, the papers demonstrate that wartime Asia was a site of intensive, if coerced, globalization, and that Asia was central—not peripheral—to these processes.
Chairs:
Tatsuya Mitsuda, Keio University
Chad B. Denton, Yonsei University
Papers:
“‘Efficiency’ and the Globalisation of Military Organisation: Inter-service Interactions Between First World War Officers in Asia”
Loughlin Sweeney, Yonsei University
“Mobilizing Metal for Total War: German Models and Japanese Metal Requisitions, 1937–1945”
Chad B. Denton, Yonsei University
“Inter-Allied Military and Economic Aid in Asia During the Second World War: Warlike Globalisation?”
Thomas W. Bottelier, Utrecht University
_______
4D: Panel
Hydro Developmentalism in and after the Empire of Japan
Room 304
Abstract:
Today, hydropower is promoted as a greener alternative to fossil fuel power. While historians have developed vigorous discussions about coal and oil, such as “carbon democracy” and “carbon technocracy” hydropower has received little theoretical attention, despite its significance. Many countries have heavily relied on hydropower for their industrialization since the late 19th century, and dam construction was and still is a popular big-ticket development aid project after 1945. This panel aims to develop an analytical framework to examine hydropower and the politics of water management under the theme of hydro developmentalism in the Japanese empire.
We tackle the following questions: What social, geopolitical, and environmental conditions enable hydro developmentalism, and what new power dynamics does hydro developmentalism generate? How did these dynamics develop differently between colonial, postcolonial, and socialist nation-building contexts? How might hydro developmentalism differ from coal/petrol developmentalism? How have diverse historical actors understood the linkages between hydropower, development, and their ecological ramifications? Four panelists present our current research to engage with these questions: Wilson on conflicts between hydro developers and affected local residents in early twentieth-century Japan, Mizuno on the Japanese empire’s “carbon technocracy” and “hydro technocracy” in colonial Korea and Manchuria/northeast China, Yamane on wartime dam construction and its direct influence postwar land development policies and projects and Dinmore on a Japanese-Indonesian large dam and aluminum smelting project in Suharto-era Sumatra.
Chair:
Roderick Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Papers:
“The Asahan Project: Hydroelectricity for Aluminum, Japanese Resource Security, and the Indonesian New Order”
Eric Dinmore, Hampden-Sydney College
“Hydro Developmentalism for Farms and Arms: The Case of the Japanese Empire”
Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota
“Development of Hydro Power along the Kiso River in Central Japan, 1910s - 1930s”
Roderick Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“The Shift in the Positioning of the Kitakami River Basin Development Project from Wartime to Postwar”
Nobuhiro Yamane, Shonan Institute of Technology
_______
4E: Panel
Reframing Korea’s Cold War: Environmentalism, Migration, and Knowledge-Exchange across Borders
Room 403
Abstract:
This panel explores the transformation of the Korean peninsula from the Korean War to the late twentieth century, foregrounding migration, rural reconstruction, knowledge exchange, and environmental activism. Moving beyond state-centered and security-driven narratives, it highlights how everyday actors and transnational networks reshaped the Korean society and environment across and beyond Cold War geopolitics. The panel reinterprets the peninsula not as a static site of ideological confrontation, but as a dynamic hub of circulation, exchange, and contestation.
Jaehyung Kim reveals the porous character of the North Korea - China frontier during the Korean War, showing how refugee movements and smuggling networks endured despite militarization. James Podgorski situates South Korea’s postwar Community Development programs within Korean - American collaborations, demonstrating how rural modernization served as a key arena for advancing liberal developmental visions. Man Joong Kim traces the circulation of urbanism through U.S. academic networks, illustrating how cities such as Gwangju were reframed within transnational circuits of expertise and dissent. Yejun Kweon examines environmental activism in the two Koreas, arguing that housewives’ domestic labor functioned as a care-based ecological infrastructure linking grassroots anti-pollution campaigns in the South with women-led conservation practices embedded in North Korea’s socialist mobilization.
Collectively, the panel’s significance lies in its transnational framework linking wartime mobility, intellectual exchange, and ecological politics. Methodologically, the panel centers invisible and understudied actors, demonstrating how global Cold War structures were localized, negotiated, and reshaped in the daily lives of people. In doing so, it transcends the view of the peninsula as a geopolitically isolated island, instead integrating it into broader continental and global networks. It contributes to Korean studies, Cold War history, and environmental history by framing mobility, knowledge circulation, and care-based social reproduction as the key forces that bridged the peninsula with the world.
Chair:
Cheehyung Harrison Kim, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Papers:
“Gender, Care, and Environmental Activism in the Two Koreas”
Yejun Kweon, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
“Smuggling on the Margins: Refugee Crossings to China during the Korean War”
Jaehyung Kim, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
“Constellating the Gwangju Complex Uprising of 1971”
Man Joong Kim, Binghamton University
“The New Village Before 1970: Community Development in post-UNKRA South Korea and the Legacy of a Global New Deal”
James Podgorski, Binghamton University
_______
4F: Panel
Teaching Korean History: Textbooks, Curriculum, and Historical Thinking
Room 201
Abstract:
This panel brings together scholars working at the intersection of historiography, pedagogy, and curriculum design, using Korean educational contexts as a lens for understanding how history is transmitted and contested across generations and national borders. Soeun Lee's comparative analysis of South Korean and Spanish history textbooks reveals how colonial memory is linguistically constructed in national curricula, showing that textbooks are less neutral archives than politically charged translations of the past. Keiichi Kawashima's paper examines how Japanese high school students use South Korean textbooks as mirrors for transnational dialogue, a practice that transforms curricular material into a tool for cross-cultural empathy and historical reconciliation. Kim GyeongHo's cognitive study of how middle school students conceptualize historical change, distinguishing progress from regression and continuity, grounds the panel in the developmental psychology of historical understanding, asking what "change" actually means to young learners. Jeewon Park's comparison of South Korean world history frameworks with AP World History raises fundamental questions about how global interconnectedness is structured differently in competing curricular traditions. Together, these papers argue that history education is never merely pedagogical but always a site where memory, national identity, and visions of global order are actively shaped.
Chair:
Michelle Morgan, Missouri State University
Papers:
“Colonial Pasts between National Memory and World History: A Comparative Linguistic Analysis of South Korea and Spain's History Textbooks”
Soeun Lee, Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation
“Reconstructing Historical Narratives through South Korean History Textbooks as a Mirror: Learning Practices in Japanese High School Integrated History Classes for Transnational Dialogue”
Keiichi Kawashima, Doshisha Junior and Senior High School in Kyoto, Japan
“Patterns of Middle School Students Understanding of the Concept of Change in History Learning: A Focus on Progress, Regression, and Continuity”
Kim GyeongHo, Seoul National University
“Structuring Global Interconnectedness in World History: A Comparative Analysis of South Korea and AP World History: Modern (1200-1750)”
Jeewon Park, Chongshin University
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4G: Innovative Session
Meet the Editor: World History Connected
Room 208
Abstract:
This is an opportunity for conference participants to hear about World History Connected's vision and related publication opportunities. The Editor will walk participants through the publication process, especially addressing the concerns and questions of attendees that have not yet published work and those interested in guest editing a forum on a special topic. Teacher-scholars welcome!
Presenter:
Cynthia Ross, East Texas A&M University
_______
4H: Workshop
Teaching World Histories of Religion and Empire in a Neo-Imperial Age
Room 302
Abstract:
With dominant global actors assertively holding forth neo-imperial ambitions, often draped in multilayered religious, indeed messianic symbology (take a recent Israeli billboard depicting Donald Trump as a returned Cyrus the Great), it is revealing to teach critical world histories of religion and empire. Across time and geographic space, transformational dynamics between religion and empire are signal for thinking deeply about these world-making forces, including self-reflection on our own normative perceptions surrounding matters like decolonization, and resurging empire. A foundation is built by considering how empire, as a seminal, enduring form of human governance, is inseparable from how we come to imagine the phenomenon and divine referents of religion–from ancient Near Eastern re-envisioning of transcendence and immanence, to the modern colonial mind’s pivotal role in constructing our notion of religion, in the first instance. Following a transit through such chronological turning points as the Axial Age (while of course asking why we might judge it to be so), and Ibn Khaldun’s universalist yet historically bound reading of pre-Islamic and Islamic empires’ rise and fall, we arrive at moments helping to frame our own world. Emblematic are modern Euro-American empires’ seeking to definitionally divide and rule religious communities, while variously superimposing their own civilizational proselytizing, and yet undergoing syncretic encounters with colonized religious practitioners’ own agency and resistance. Today, diverse worldwide forms of imperial messianism, emanating from across Eurasia together with the United States’ claimed anointing, underscore how the religion-empire nexus is fundamental to a world both eschewing and remaking globalism.
Presenter:
Andrew M. Wender, University of Victoria
Evening festivities 18:00-21:00
Opening Ceremony and Banquet
Location: Orakai Songdo Park Hotel, Lily Hall and 2nd floor
Opening ceremony, welcoming remarks, announcement of awards, keynote address “Being in Between: Reflections on Cultural Brokers and the Dutch East India Company," presented by Dr. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Emory University, followed by a reception.