About the Asian and Middle Eastern History Program
The graduate track in Asian and Middle Eastern History is designed to allow students to pursue the study of the histories of Asia, the Middle East, and Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas using transnational, regional, and/or national approaches. The intellectual focus of the track consists of several overlapping areas that include, but are not limited to: gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; religion; migration and diaspora; law; science and medicine; environment; cultural memory, and imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. While many of the faculty focus their research on distinct geographies and temporalities, our interests cut across geographical and chronological boundaries. Our scholarship and teaching benefit from exploring questions and paradigms that are echoed or challenged in the work of colleagues who study neighboring as well as distant regions, nations, societies, and periods. Students in Asian and Middle Eastern History will have an opportunity to engage in and contribute to such cross-border, comparative, and longue durée thinking, while also developing expertise in a specific geographical, temporal, and/or thematic area(s).
The Faculty in Asian and Middle Eastern History
Tuna Artun
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Princeton University
Late Medieval and Early Modern Middle East and Balkans; Alchemy in the Ottoman world; Byzantine History
Daniel Asen (Newark)
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Columbia University
Modern China; history of science, technology, and medicine; legal history
Kornel Chang (Newark)
Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Asian American, Transnational, Imperial History: Histories of Race, Migration, and Labor in the America, and the United States in the Pacific world
Chie Ikeya
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Cornell University
Modern Southeast Asia; Burma-Myanmar; transnational history of race, gender, sexuality, and intimacy; postcolonial studies
Toby Jones
Associate Professor of History and Director, Global and Comparative History Master's Degree Program
Ph.D., Stanford University
Middle East, Global Technoscience, Environment
Nick Kapur (Camden)
Assistant Professor of History
Ph.D., Harvard University
Modern Japan and East Asia; US-Japan relations; transnational history; literature, visual culture & film; environmental history
Suzy Kim
Associate Professor of Korean History
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Modern Korea; North Korea; gender; revolution and social movements
D. Christian Lammerts
Associate Professor of Buddhist and Southeast Asian Studies
Ph.D., Cornell University
Premodern and early modern Southeast Asia; Burma; law; Buddhism
Sukhee Lee
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Harvard University
Middle period China; social and intellectual
Xun Liu
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Southern California
Religion, medicine, and material culture in China
Kathleen Lopez
Associate Professor of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and History
Ph.D., University of Michigan
Latin American and Caribbean History, Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean, race and ethnicity in the Americas, diaspora and international migration
Johan Mathew
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Harvard University
Transnational and global history, Indian Ocean, economic history
Gary Rendsberg
Professor of Jewish Studies and History
Ph.D., New York University
Ancient Israel; literature of the Bible; historical development of the Hebrew language; relationship between ancient Egypt and ancient Israel; Dead Sea scrolls; post-Biblical Judaism; medieval Hebrew manuscripts
Stephen W. Reinert
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., UCLA
Byzantine; medieval Balkans; early Ottoman history
Tamara Sears
Associate Professor of Art History
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
South Asian visual culture; Religious art and architecture; Medieval studies; Colonial historiography; Landscape studies; Environment; Transregional studies
Tatiana Seijas
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Yale University
Early Modern Global History; Pacific World; Philippine Islands; Mexico; Slavery; Iberian Empires; Borderlands; early modern economics; 19th-century US-Mexico relations
Nancy Sinkoff
Professor of Jewish Studies and History
Ph.D., Columbia University
Jewish history, politics, and labor; cultural and intellectual history of East European Jewry; early modern Poland
Julia Stephens
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Harvard University
Colonial and postcolonial South Asia, Islam, law, diasporic family histories
Paola Tartakoff
Professor of History and Jewish Studies
Ph.D., Columbia University
Social and cultural history of Jews and Christians in medieval and early modern Europe and the Mediterranean
Audrey Truschke (Newark)
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Columbia University
South Asian history, Mughal Empire, modern India and Pakistan; cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of early modern and modern India (c. 1500-present)
Andy Urban
Associate Professor of American Studies and History
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Asian-American; immigration, race, gender, and labor
