I am currently an Assistant Professor in the History of International Affairs at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland (with permanency, equivalent to US tenure) and the incoming Director of the UCD Centre for Asia-Pacific Research.
My research seeks to understand the modern history of East Asia, the Asia Pacific, the international community and the interdependence between them from the 1870s to the present. My first book traced the League of Nations system of drug control back to Chinese, Indian and Japanese anti-drug positions in the wake of the Opium Wars and was published by Harvard University Press. I have also published on global journalism, international public opinion and imperial accountability in the early twentieth century, on trans-Pacific cooperation in women’s higher education and international regimes against human trafficking.
Since 2010, my research affiliations have connected my research to interdisciplinary dialogue with colleagues in political science, sociology, anthropology and international public law. I have an abiding interest in global governance institutions like League of Nations and the United Nations bodies and their operation vis-à-vis East Asia. My second monograph with Harvard University Press reexamines the social, intellectual and political underpinnings of Sino-American cooperation from the age of empire to the Cold War and its lasting imprint on global politics.
Outside of academia, I gave the Bertha von Suttner masterclass lecture organized by the Peace Palace Library in The Hague, Netherlands, and addressed the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (UNCND) at the Reconvened 62nd session on multilateralism.
2007 BA, History, University of Konstanz
2007-08 Exchange Scholar, Department of History, Yale University
2010 MA, History (international), Harvard University
2010-12 Graduate Student Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
2011-12 John Clive Fellow, Harvard University
2011-12 Research Fellow, Canada Program, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
2012-13 Dissertation Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
2013 SIAS Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
2014 PhD, History (international), Harvard University
2014 SIAS Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina
2013-15 Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Studies, Yale University
2015-16 Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
2015 Postdoctoral Visiting Research Research Fellow, Rothermere American Institute & guest, Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford
2016-17 Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden
2016-17. Transregional Research Junior Scholar, InterAsian Contexts and Connections Program, Social Science Research Council
2017 Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University
2017 Visiting Researcher, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Tobunken), University of Tokyo
2017-19 Assistant Professor of the History of International Relations, Utrecht University
2020-present Ad Astra Fellow & Assistant Professor in the History of International Affairs, University College Dublin
2022-23 Associate Member, University Seminar on Modern Japan, Columbia University
2023 Visiting Scholar, Harvard University
2023 Visiting Scholar, Tokyo College, University of Tokyo
2024- Assistant Professor in the History of International Affairs, University College Dublin (UCD) (with permanency, equivalent to US tenure)
2024- Director of the UCD Centre for Asia-Pacific Research
Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018).
“From the Leak to the League: the Japanese drug trade, global public opinion and accountability, 1915-1919,” in Valeska Huber; Jürgen Osterhammel, ed., Global Publics: their power and their limits, 1870-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 [Studies of the German Historical Institute, London], 2020).
“The Politics of Locating Violence: On the Japanese Nationalist Critique of American Racism after World War I,” Journal of the British Academy 8, supplementary issue 3, June 2020 https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/journal-british-academy/8s3/
“History’s Hatred: China’s War on Drugs and the Power of Past Violence,” Epicenter (Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University), February 2019.
https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/historys-hatred-chinas-war-on-drugs
“Chinese abolitionism: the Chinese Educational Mission in Connecticut, Cuba and Peru”, Journal of Global History, 11, 3 (Nov. 2016)
“Macro-region Gone Missing: The Pacific Rim,” International Institute for Asian Studies, The Newsletter 75 (Autumn 2016).
“Beyond the Call of Duty: Cosmopolitan Education and the Origins of Asian-American Women’s Medicine,” in: Robert David Johnson, ed., Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
