My interests

Why do people decide to fight for their nations and people? What turns people into supporters of an ideology? I have been intrigued by these questions for two and half decades now, which drove me to study the intersection between the nation, the military, and society in East Asia. I found my academic home in the field of history, but am eager to learn other theories and methods that help me better investigate these issues.

​I teach histories of modern East Asian societies, ideology and emotions, research methods, and the Japanese colonial empire as an associate professor in the department of history, National University of Singapore. I have two beautiful children and two bunnies.

As a side project, I am hosting a website to solve my own teaching problem: we don’t have many primary sources that we can use in English-speaking class! In addition to choosing from the sources I have, I have asked a number of historians to contribute theirs to enrich our options of teaching material. Each excerpt accompanies a short introduction about the piece, data of the original source, and the English translation. I have hired competent student/postgraduate translators for this project. Visit Grassroots Operations of the Japanese Empire for more details.

If you are interested in contributing a source along with an introduction (and if you can, the translation as well), please contact me.