“Studying the histories of China and Japan at a liberal arts college transformed my life as an early twenty-something, and set me on a path that I have been following and creating ever since. The opportunity to open those doorways for Goucher’s students is what continues to drive me forward on that road.”
Evan Dawley
Associate ProfessorHistory
Evan Dawley is Associate Professor of History at Goucher College, where he has taught since 2013, and he previously worked in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. His research relates to modern East Asian history, with particular attention to Taiwan, China, and Japan, as well as identity formation, imperialism, and international/transnational history. His first monograph, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, was published in 2019 by the Harvard Asia Center Press. He has published essays on Japanese women settlers in Taiwan during the 1910s, the deportation of Japanese from Taiwan after 1945, and on recent scholarship on Taiwanese identity. He has co-edited The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s, with Tosh Minohara and Tze-ki Hon (Brill, 2014), and is co-editor of Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment in East Asia, with Tosh Minohara, forthcoming. In his new project, tentatively titled “Chinese at Home, Chinese Abroad, and the International Construction of Chinese Nationalism,” he explores the relations between the ROC government and communities of Chinese and Taiwanese abroad, and interactions with foreign governments around these communities, from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Research, Scholarship, Creative Work in Progress
My first book, Becoming Taiwanese, sought to answer two main questions: who are the Taiwanese, and how did they become so in the context of multiple waves of colonization? Focusing on the social history of Taiwan’s northern port city of Jilong, I uncovered a history of identity construction that challenges standard narratives of Taiwanese national identity and argues for a process of ethno-genesis and a dynamic, overlapping but not coterminous, relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. In my next project, “Chinese at Home, Chinese Abroad,” I am looking at the process of national construction, and the fissures within the modern nation-state, by exploring how nationalities are constructed across and between states through outreach to, and disputes around, overseas Chinese communities in Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States.
Publications
Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, Harvard University Asia Center Press, May 2019
Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment in East Asia, co-editor with Tosh Minohara, under contract with Lexington Books, forthcoming
The Decade of the Great War: Japan’s Interactions with the Wider World in the 1910s, co-editor with Tosh Minohara and Tze-ki Hon, Brill, 2014
Entry on “Taiwan,” in 1914-1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, eds., issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-05-13; https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/taiwan/2019-05-13?version=1.0
“China, Japan, and Overseas Chinese: The International Process of Nation-State Building during the May Fourth Era,” in Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment in East Asia, Minohara and Dawley, eds., Lexington Books, forthcoming
“Finding Meaning in Time and Space: Periodisation and Taiwan-Centred History,” International Journal of Taiwan Studies, August 2018
“Closing a Colony: The Meanings of Japanese Deportation from Taiwan after World War II,” in Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and its Contested Legacy, edited by Andrew Morris, Bloomsbury Press, 2015
“Religion, Ideology, Culture and the Integration/Disintegration of the Pacific World,” in Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization, edited by Akira Iriye and K.C. Johnson, Palgrave, 2015
“Women on the Move: Shifting Patterns in Migration and the Colonization of Taiwan,” in The Decade of the Great War: Japan’s Interactions with the Wider World in the 1910s, Minohara, Hon, and Dawley, eds., Brill, 2014
“Expanding Japan: Reforming Society through Social Work in Colonial Taiwan,” in Tumultuous Decade: Japan’s Challenge to the International System, 1931–1941, edited by Masato Kimura and Tosh Minohara, University of Toronto Press, 2013
“The Question of Identity in Recent Scholarship on the History of Taiwan,” review essay, The China Quarterly, June 2009
External Awards, Honors, Grants
National Endowment for the Humanities Group Research Grant (2017)
Taiwan Fellowship, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (2017)
Collaborative Scholarship Grant, Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation, Japan (2017)
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Publication Grant (2018)
Association of Asian Studies China-Inner Asian Council Small Grant (2014)
Conference Papers & Panel Participation
“Building and Fracturing the Local: Identities in Japanese-Era Urban Taiwan, 1910–37” for panel on “Belonging within the Japanese Empire: Identity Construction in Greater China across the 20th Century” Annual Conference of the American Historical Association, New York, NY, January 5, 2020
“Teaching Taiwan: Integrating Taiwan into Asian Studies and Global Humanities and Social Sciences Courses” Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, Denver, CO, March 21-24, 2019
“Issues of Access: The Promise and Structural Challenges of Digital Humanities for Scholars of East Asia” Annual Conference of the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 2019; panel organizer.
“Chinese Diasporic Circulations and Fractured Alliances” Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, Washington, D.C., March 24, 2018
“China, Japan, and Overseas Chinese: The International Process of Nation-State Building during the May Fourth Era” for symposium on “Beyond Versailles: Reverberations of the ‘1919 Moment’ in Asa” Hong Kong University, July 15, 2017
“The Qiaowu weiyuanhui, Southeast Asia, and the Postwar Reconstruction of Chineseness” for panel on “Reconfigured Mobilities: China, Taiwan, and Transnational Histories of Southeast Asia’s Chinese after 1949” Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 15, 2017
Invited Talks
“Similar Dreams, Different Beds: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and the Beijing Spring,” for retrospective panel on the history and impact of demonstrations in Beijing in 1989; University of Texas-Austin, September 26-27, 2019
“Becoming Taiwanese: Religious Festivals and Ethnogenesis in Colonial Jilong,” University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, April 5, 2019.
“Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnic Identity within Chinese and Japanese Rule” Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taipei, August 2, 2017
“Collaboration as Resistance? The Defense of Taiwanese Identity” for International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, April 7, 2017
“Defining New Boundaries: Local Elites, Social Organizations, and Identity Construction in Colonial Jilong, Taiwan, 1895-1937” Johns Hopkins University Program in East Asian Studies Speaker Series, Baltimore, MD, April 12, 2016
Academic or Professional Associations
Association of Asian Studies; American Historical Association; Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
Other Professional or Scholarly Activity
Program Committee for American Historical Association Annual Conference (2019)