Graduate Student Directory

Summary of Expertise

China; diaspora; transnational and global history; Christianity; education; development; Cold War

Biography, Education and Training

I was born and grew up in Singapore, before traveling to North America for further education, where I received a B.A. in History from New York University (2016), and an M.A. in History from the University of British Columbia (2018). Subsequently, I was trained as a historian of modern East Asia under the supervision of Professor Shelly Chan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2018-20) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (2020-prsent), specializing in the histories of modern and transnational China, Chinese migration and diaspora, the Cold War in Asia, and global Christianity. 

My doctoral dissertation, titled “Schooling Free Asia: Diasporic Chinese and Educational Activism in the Transpacific Cold War” explores how the Chinese communist revolution of 1949 ruptured longstanding educational networks and compelled the search for new ones on both sides of the Pacific, connecting sites from New York to San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Building on recent works in cultural Cold War studies and transnational Chinese history, my research challenges the territorial boundedness of “PRC History,” the singularity of Chinese revolution in the historiography, as well as the narrowness of local histories of overseas Chinese education in Southeast Asia.

Beginning with the debates over “stranded” Chinese students and scholars in the United States and Hong Kong and the “discovery” of a large Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, I explore how the emerging Cold War in Asia shaped the discussion of a new educational culture on many levels – which Chinese to educate, how to educate and to what ends, as well as to educate by whom and for whom. My project traces a process where educational activism undertaken by ex-China missionaries, exiled Chinese students and scholars, state and non-state U.S. and British  officials, culminated in the founding of new Chinese universities outside of China, including in the British colonies of Singapore (Nanyang University) and Hong Kong (the Chinese University of Hong Kong), which served as ‘hubs’ of  a “free” Asia. The rise of these diasporic Chinese universities was inseparable from a new entanglement of education and freedom during the Cold War era. Most importantly, they were part of a broader dialogue with changing local actors and conditions that also transformed and deepened U.S. engagement in Asia.

Honors, Awards and Grants

Henry Luce foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies: Pre-dissertation Summer Travel Grant (2019)

SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Workshop (2020-2021)

UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute Summer Dissertation Fellowship (2022) 

Singapore Lee Kong Chian Reference Library Research Fellowship (2022-23) 

UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Working Group: Work and Refuge: The Future of Graduate Student Professionalization (2023-24) 

Selected Publications

“Migration, Conversion, and Transnational Activism in a Vancouver Chinese Church.” In Fenggang Yang and Chris White, Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies (Leigh University Press, 2021).

Book Reviews: 

Daryl Ireland, John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man (Baylor University Press, 2020)

Suma Ikeuchi, Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2019)

Selected Presentations

"China Missionaries in Asia: William P Fenn's 'Malaya Sojourn' and Debating Christian Higher-Education in the Early Cold War." Taiwan World Christianity Group International Conference, Taiwan Gradaute School of Theology. Hybrid conference, Taipei, Taiwan, May 2023. 

"Creating 'Stranded' Chinese Students in the Early Cold War." Transnational Turns and the Future of China Studies. Santa Cruz, CA, May 2023. 

"Educating the Overseas Chinese: Chinese Universities in Cold War Asia." Paper accepted to the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference. Panel organizer and chair: "Producing China in Cold War Asia and Asian America." Boston, MA, March 2023.

"Diaspora, Decolonization and the Cold War University: Revisiting Singapore's Nanyang University (1950s-60s). Nanyang Technological University History Postgradaute Workshop Series. Singapore, January, 2023

"Beyond the 'Chinese problem': Chinese Christian Diaspora and Cold War Religion in British Malaya and Singapore, 1950s-60s,' Yale Divinity School, Yale-Edinburgh Coference on World Christainity. Panel co-organizer: "Chinese Christainity, Transnationalism and the Cold War." Hybrid Conferenece, New Haven, CT, 2022.

Teaching Interests

 Spring 2023, HIST 104C Revolutionary China, 1895-1960, Instructor of Record 

Teaching Assistant for various courses, including: Chinese Migrations since 1500, Introduction to Chinese History, World History in the Twentieth Century, History of South Asia, History of Africa