Presenters (Alphabetical)
Gary Baines
Gary Baines is a Professor and HoD at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts (Unisa Press, 2008) and author of South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Song-Chuan Chen
Song-Chuan Chen’s research expertise lies in China’s historical interactions with Britain in particular, and with the modern world in general, from the seventeenth century onwards. His first book Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War (Hong Kong University Press, 2016, forthcoming) rewrites the history of the war by arguing that it was started by a group of British merchants known at the time as the Warlike Party in Canton. It contends that it was not the infamous opium smuggling trade, nor the defence of British national honour that led to the war. The war began with the merchants’ public campaigns to change British knowledge on China. Chen has started working on the Cold War history of Taiwan. The project is rooted in his upbringing on Matsu—one of Taiwan’s Cold War frontier islands—in a period when the militarisation of the islands was intensifying, and when ghosts and deities were believed to reign supreme by the people there.
Poppy Cullen
Poppy Cullen is currently Lecturer in Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD at Durham University in 2015. This was entitled ”Kenya is no doubt a special case’: British policy towards Kenya, 1960-1980′ and focused on Britain’s decolonisation and subsequent relationship with Kenya after independence, highlighting the economic, military, personal and diplomatic connections successive British governments sustained with Kenya well beyond the end of formal colonial rule in 1963.
Edgar Elbakyan
Edgar Elbakyan is a PhD student at Yerevan State University, Armenia. He is writing a PhD dissertation on the topic of Azerbaijani-American relations since 1991. In 2015 he received a master’s degree in the field of International Relations (IR). In 2013 he had received a bachelor’s degree in the same discipline. Edgar Elbakyan is an author of twelve scholarly articles, published both in Armenia and abroad. Currently he works as a research assistant at the Scientific Laboratory for Strategic Research, Yerevan State University. He also publishes analytical articles on security and foreign policy issues in Armenian daily newspaper Hayastany Hanrapetutyun. He was born on 29 March 1994, in the city of Vanadzor, Republic of Armenia.
Sinae Hyun
Sinae Hyun is a postdoctoral fellow in the Global Asia research cluster, affiliated with the History Programme at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Nanyang Technological University. She obtained her Masters degree and PhD from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Department of History respectively at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hyun’s research generally focuses on the studies of Cold War and nation-building in Southeast Asia, paying close attention to the role of local ruling elites and their collaboration with foreign powers. Currently, she is preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Indigenizing the Cold War” based on her doctoral dissertation.
Hyung-Wook Kim
Hyung-Wook Kim is teaching a course at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) as a Lecturer. After receiving Ph.D in East Asian Studies at UCLA, he taught courses at Yale University and Boston College as a Postdoctoral Associate and Visiting Assistant Professor respectively. His academic interest is collective memory and nationalism in East Asia where strong collective consciousness based on nationalism is still prevailing and appearing consistently in various occasions such as history wars and territorial disputes among East Asian nations.
Chien-Wen Kung
Chien-Wen Kung is a doctoral candidate in International and Global History at Columbia University. His dissertation, tentatively entitled “The Philippine Chinese Between Taiwan and China: Anticommunism, Transnationalism, and the Nation-State Order in East Asia, 1945-1975,” examines how Chinese in the Philippines forged anticommunist relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan while maintaining illicit ties with mainland China after the Chinese Civil War. Born in Singapore, he graduated summa cum laude with majors in History and English from Dartmouth College before spending several years teaching modern Southeast Asian history at his other alma mater, Raffles Junior College. His research has been funded by the Tokyo Foundation, the Association for Asian Studies, and Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Magdalena López
Magdalena “Magui” López has a PhD in Social Science at the Universidad of Buenos Aires, Argentina and a Licenciatura in Political Science in the same institution. She is a young researcher at the Institute of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, where she directs the “Social Studies on Paraguay” group.
She has a special interest on the characteristics of democracy and dictatorships in Latin-America, focusing in Paraguay and she studies the role of the states and the political elites in them. She also analyzes the continuity between the dictator and the democracy in the repression system and the organization of different institutions in Paraguay.
She is part of the University of Buenos Aires since more than 14 years and she has been awarded with and UNFPA prize for her work in human rights.
She has a postdoctoral position at the Gino Germani Institute and she is part of CONICET (Argentinean National Commission of scientific and technique research).
Dave Mills
Dave Mills teaches history at Minnesota West Community College in Worthington, MN. He received his Ph.D. from North Dakota State University under the direction of distinguished historian Tom Isern. His primary area of study is the Great Plains in the postwar era. His examination of the Cold War in that region has produced a book entitled, Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains, available through the University of Oklahoma Press. Dave is working with the North Dakota State University Press to publish Operation Snowbound: Federal Intervention into the Blizzards of 1949, another examination of the Great Plains in the postwar era. He is currently in the Ufa, Russia, on a Fulbright Fellowship but in Minnesota, he teaches a wide variety of courses from ancient Greece and Rome to present day America and Europe.
Sidnei J. Munhoz
Sidnei J. Munhoz is PhD in Economical History/ University of São Paulo. Professor of Contemporary History at State University of Maringá (Brazil) and Visiting Scholar of the Brown University (2015-2016). Publications include: Brazil U.S Relations in the 20th and 21st Centuries (2013); Cidade ao avesso: desordem e progresso em São Paulo no limiar do século XX (2015).
John Munro
John Munro teaches US and international history in the history department at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. His articles have appeared in the Canadian Review of American Studies, Third World Quarterly, History Workshop Journal, and in Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence, edited by Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake.
Vanni Pettinà
Dr. Vanni Pettinà is Associate Professor of Latin American International History at the Center for Historical Studies of El Colegio de México, in México City. In 2012, he was a Kluge Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Library of Congress and, in 2013, an AECID Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Historical Studies of El Colegio de México. He is author of a book, Cuba y Estados Unidos, 1933-1959. Del Compromiso Nacionalista al Conflicto, several articles in scholarly journals such as International History Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Cold War History, Historia Mexicana, Revista de Indias, Culture and History and book chapters in different edited volumes published in Spain, Latin America and the US. At the moment, his research is focusing on the international history of Mexico’s developmental project between 1947 and the late 1970s and he is writing a Historia Minima of the Cold War in Latin America.
Fernando Purcell
Fernando Purcell is Asociate Professor at the Instituto de Historia, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis in 2004 where he started doing research on transnational and global history. He was Vice-Chair and later Head of the History Department at his University between 2006 and 2015. He serves as part of the Board of Editors in several journals including the Hispanic American Historical Review, The Sixties and Revista de Estudios Sociales. His most recent books include Ampliando miradas. Chile y su historia en un tiempo global (Ril-IHI UC, 2009) and ¡De película! Hollywood y su impacto en Chile, 1910-1950 (Taurus, 2012). In the past five years he has been doing research on the Cold War in Latin America, studying aspects related to community development, politics and culture between 1945 and 1970.
Victoria Vasilenko
Victoria Vasilenko is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History and International Relations in the Department of World History and International Area Studies at Belgorod State University, Russia. Her research interests include international history of WWII (mostly with the focus on Polish question), Cold War genesis, and contemporary Russian-Polish relations. Victoria`s recent publication: ‘The Polish-Czechoslovak Confederation Project in British Policy, 1939-1943: A Federalist Alternative to Postwar Settlement in East Central Europe’ Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 49, autumn/automne, 2014, pp. 203-223.
Dean Vuletic
As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Department of East European History at the University of Vienna, Dr. Dean Vuletic has led the project “Eurovision: A History of Europe through Popular Music.” He is currently completing the book “Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest,” which will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017. His research on Eurovision has been published in several books and journals and he has been widely interviewed about it in the European media. He has also taught courses on the history of Eurovision and on culture and the Cold War at institutions such as the European University Institute, New York University and the University of Vienna. From 2010 to 2012, Dr. Vuletic was a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He was awarded his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2010, and he completed his MA and BA degrees in European Studies at Yale University and the Australian National University respectively.
Xiaojue Wang
Xiaojue Wang is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University. She is the author of Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013). She was An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University from 2012 to 2013 and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in Spring 2013. She has published numerous articles on modern Chinese literature, the cultural Cold War, film and visual studies, German literature, and comparative literature. She is also the Chinese translator and co-translator of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Horkheimer Reader, and Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, among others. She is currently working on a co-edited volume on Lu Xun and Sinophone Asia and a monograph on Eileen Chang and the concept of literature.
Colleen Woods
Professor Colleen Woods is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Woods specializes in the history of the U.S. in a global context during the twentieth century with a particular focus on the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Woods is finishing her book manuscript titled, Bombs, Bureaucrats, and Rosary Beads: The United States, the Philippines, and the Making of Global Anti-Communism. Before joining the history faculty at the University of Maryland, Woods spent the 2012-2013 academic years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Amherst College. Woods received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 2012.
Xu Lanjun
Xu Lanjun is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at National University of Singapore and she completed her PhD in East Asian Studies in 2007 at Princeton. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature and culture, cultural history of children and youth in modern China, cold war politics and Chinese cultures. She is the author of Chinese Children and War: Education, Nation and Mass Cultures (Peking University Press, 2015). And she has recently completed an English book manuscript tentatively titled The Child and Chinese Modernity: Culture, Nation and Technologies of Childhood in Modern China. Since 2012, she has also started to work on a new English book project on the transnational cultural contacts between China and Chinese communities in Southeast Asian countries from the 1940s-1970s, focusing on literary translation, film, and broadcasting.
Discussants (Alphabetical)
David C. Engerman
David C. Engerman is Ottilie Springer Professor and Chair in the History Department at Brandeis University, where he has taught international history and modern American history since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998. He is President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations for 2016.
His Berkeley dissertation, revised, appeared as Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003); it won the Stuart Bernath and Akira Iriye Prizes and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has also published Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), edited a new edition of The God That Failed (Columbia, 2003) and has co-edited two sets of essays on modernization and development programs.
Engerman was named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network (2010) and was awarded the Bernath Lectureship for “excellence in teaching and research” by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (2006). His scholarly articles have appeared in major U.S. journals, including the American Historical Review, and in journals of six other countries. Beyond these scholarly outlets, his writings have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s Magazine, Humanities, and in the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune.
Building on his earlier scholarship on American programs of development aid, his current project is “Development Politics: The Economic Cold War in India” (under contract to Harvard University Press). Using sources from more than a dozen archives in five countries, the project explores the ways in which superpower aid competition in the newly independent nations revealed important elements – and key contradictions – of the global Cold War. This project is supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Heonik Kwon
Heonik Kwon is a social anthropologist interested in Cold War comparative history and currently Senior Research Fellow & Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His previous works include Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008) and The Other Cold War (2010). His forthcoming book, The Political Life of Kinship after the Korean War, investigates an intimate history of Korea’s Cold War experience.
Petrus Liu
Petrus Liu is Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. He is the author of Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Cornell East Asia Series, 2011) and Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015; currently a finalist for this year’s Lambda Literary Award), and a coeditor (with Lisa Rofel) of “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics,” a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique that won the 2010 MLA’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Journal Special Issue. He is currently working on a new book titled Cold War Aesthetics in Queer Asia on a J. Y. Pillay Fellowship.
S.R. Joey Long
S.R. Joey Long is associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the cold and hot wars in post-WWII Southeast Asia, the history of American foreign relations with Asia, the history of Singapore, and Asia-Pacific security. In addition to articles published in Diplomatic History, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and a number of edited volumes, Long is the author of Safe for Decolonization: The Eisenhower Administration, Britain, and Singapore (Kent State University Press, 2011).
Alan McPherson
Alan McPherson is Professor of International and Area Studies, ConocoPhillips Petroleum Chair of Latin American Studies, and Director of the Center for the Americas at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author or editor of nine books, including the multiple-prize-winning Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Harvard, 2003) and The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (2014). HIs latest is A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean (Wiley, 2016).
Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu
Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu is Dunlevie Family Professor of History at Rice University. Her research focuses on the U. S. and the World, global sport history, international political economy and environmental history. Her most recent book is _Transpacific Field of Dreams_ (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
Paul Steege
Paul Steege is Associate Professor of History at Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA). He received his A.B. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His book, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949, was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently preparing a book on everyday violence in twentieth century Berlin.
Taomo Zhou
Taomo Zhou is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She will take up a position as Assistant Professor at the same institute in June 2016. Taomo received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she specializes in modern Chinese as well as modern Southeast Asian history. Taomo has published two peer-reviewed journal articles on the interactions between China and Indonesia during the Cold War period: “Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy towards Indonesia, 1960- 1965,” The China Quarterly, volume 221 (March 2015), pp. 208-228, and “China and the Thirtieth of September Movement,” Indonesia 98 (October 2014), pp. 29-58. Taomo is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Diaspora and Diplomacy: China, Indonesia and the Cold War, 1949-1967.”
Organizer
Masuda Hajimu
Masuda Hajimu (family name Masuda) is a historian whose work concerns social and global history of the Cold War, U.S. foreign relations history, and modern history of East Asia. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2012, and currently is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015), and has published a number of book chapters and articles which can be found in Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History, Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and Journal of American-East Asian Relations, as well as IIAS Newsletter and History News Network.