Shang (Kaho) Yasuda

Shang Yasuda is a PhD Candidate in History, working on the Japanese and U.S. empires in the mid-twentieth century, from the build-up to World War II through the global “Cold War” and decolonization. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Soldiering through Time and Space: Taiwanese Mobilizations in the Japanese and U.S. Empires, 1930s – 1970s,” traces the trajectories of Taiwanese people — many of whom had served in, or were otherwise involved with, the Japanese Imperial Army — as they traversed three empires over their lifetimes. Through a focus on processes of racialization, (labor) migration, imperial violence, and militarization, the dissertation ties the “prewar” and “postwar” into a cohesive storyline, to explore how different structures of militarization and colonialism converged to impact the everyday choices of people on the ground. In doing so, it explores the pervasiveness of colonial structures that do not simply disappear when empires “withdraw” or are defeated and dismantled.  More broadly, she seeks to place the story of Taiwan within the contexts of (settler) colonialism and decolonization, U.S. empire, transpacific migration, and development (aid) history.

Shang served as co-president of Clio, the history department’s graduate student organization, in the 2020-2021 academic year. She was on the board of the Pan-Asian American Graduate Student Association for two years and was an Academic & Intellectual Programs Fellow at the Grad Center during the 2021-2022 academic year. Her research has been supported by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, National Chengchi University’s Office of Lo Chia-Luen International Sinology, Association of Asian Studies, the Hoover Institution, the Migrations Program of the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, and various centers at Penn including the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration. 

Advisor: Eiichiro Azuma