Huei-Ying Kuo

Huei-Ying Kuo

Associate Research Professor

Contact Information

Research Interests: Historical sociology, overseas Chinese, nationalism, colonialism, business networks, China-Southeast Asian connections

Education: PhD, SUNY-Binghamton

Dr. Huei-Ying Kuo (BA. MA, National Taiwan University; Ph. D., State University of New York, Binghamton) started her position at the Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, from July 2011. Before joining the Hopkins faculty, she was an assistant professor of Asian history (tenure track) and director of East Asian Studies minor at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology between September 2007 and June 2011. While serving at Rose-Hulman, she was selected as the Institute’s faculty member of the week and received the department’s outstanding scholar award.

She was a recipient of the Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship in 2012, the above program’s New Paradigms Grant in 2019, William Dearborn Fellowship for American History at Houghton Library, Harvard University in 2017, Outstanding Paper Award for Hong Kong studies Annual Conference in 2019.

She travels to Asia frequently and held visiting positions at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Hong Kong, and Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. She has published research articles in the broad fields of identity makings, nationalism, and empires in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as the monograph, Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor.

I research on Chinese diaspora, business networks, colonial empires, nationalism, transnationalism, and maritime East Asia in world-historical and comparative perspectives. I am the author of Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalist Activities in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor, 1914–1941 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, August 2014). In the book, I argue that Chinese overseas businesses and nationalist campaigns overlapped with the boundary of speech-group networks. In colonial Hong Kong and Singapore, through negotiating with the British and Japanese imperialist powers as well as Chinese state-builders, Chinese overseas bourgeoisie contributed to the making of an automatic space of diasporic nationalism. The book project was awarded a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research, which supported its completion in the 2012-13 academic year.

My research articles on Chinese nationalism and trade in colonial Asia have appeared in the following edited volumes: Singapore in Global History (Amsterdam University Press 2011), Chinese History in Geographical Perspectives (Lexington Press 2013) and Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism and Gender (Brill, forthcoming 2015). My works also appeared in refereed journals including Journal of Contemporary Asia, Enterprise and Society: International Journal of Business History, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, and China Information, among others.

Between May and August 2014, I was appointed as a visiting senior researcher at Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore. I am now working on two projects. The first one examines the operation of Confucian revival movements in colonial Asia. The second one compares Chinese and Japanese historiography of maritime silk road in the early twentieth century.

  • 230.166 Chinese Migration in Modern World History, 1500s-2000s
  • 230.175 Chinese Revolutions
  • 230.228 Colonialism in Asia and Its Contested Legacies
  • 230.285 Maritime East Asia
  • 230.369 Sociology in Economic Life 
  • 230.377 Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism

REFEREED ARTICLES IN ENGLISH

“Bourgeois Hong Kong and its South Seas Connections: A Cultural Logic of Overseas Chinese Nationalism, 1919-1933,” Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 25 (1), 2019: 146–166. (The article receives the Outstanding Article Award, the Academy of Hong Kong Studies (AHKS) of the Education University of Hong Kong, 2019)

 “Charting China in the Thirteenth-Century World: The First English Translation of Zhu fan zhi and Its Recipients in China in the 1930s,” in Patrick Manning and Abigail Owen eds., Knowledge in Translation: Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000-1800 CE (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2018): 93-116. (Research of this article is under the sponsorship of the William Dearborn Fellowship in American History at Houghton Library, Harvard University, in the 2016-2017 academic year)

“The South Seas Chinese in Colonial Classifications,” in Albert Tzeng, William L. Richter and Ekaterina Kuldonova eds., Framing 'Asian Studies': Geopolitics, Institutions and Networks (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018): 231-252.

“Enumerating Taiwanese in American Censuses: Challenges and Implications,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (2017): 59-68.

“Learning from the South: Japan's Racial Construction of Southern Chinese, 1895-1941,” in Walter Demel and Rotem Kowner eds., Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism and Gender (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publisher, 2015): 151-177.

“Native-Place Ties in Transnational Networks: Overseas Chinese Nationalist Campaigns and Fujian’s Development, 1928-1941,” in Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain eds., Chinese History in Geographical Perspective, 1500-Present (Lexington, MA: Lexington Press, 2013), Ch. 8.

“Social Discourse and Economic Functions: The Singapore Chinese in Japan’s Southward Expansion, 1914-1941,” in Derek Heng and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied eds., Singapore in Global History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), Ch. 6.

“ ’One Country, Two Systems’ and Its Antagonists in Tibet and Taiwan,” China Information, vol. 24. 2010), no. 3: 317-337 (co-authored with Ho-fung Hung).

“Agency amid Incorporation: Chinese Business Networks in Hong Kong and Singapore and the Colonial Origins of the Resurgence of East Asia, 1800–1940,” Review: Fernand Braudel Center, Vol. 32-3 (2009): 221-237.

“Chinese Bourgeois Nationalism in Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1930s,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 36, no. 3 (August 2006): 385-405.

“Rescuing Businesses through Transnationalism: Embedded Chinese Enterprise and Nationalist Activities in Singapore in the 1930s Great Depression,” Enterprise and Society: International Journal of Business History, vol. 7, no. 1 (March 2006): 98-127.

OUTREACH PUBLICATION

 “Envisioning China in Postwar Singapore: The China Society and Dr Tan Tsze Chor, 1946-65,” in Conan Cheong ed., Living with Ink: The Collection Of Dr. Tan Tsze Chor (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum [ACM], 2019). (An invited contribution to the catalogue for ACM’s special exhibition, curated by Conan Cheong, The Collection of Dr. Tan Tsze Chor, between 8 NOV 2019 - 22 MAR 2020)

REFEREED ARTICLES IN CHINESE

兩次大戰期間香港對日貿易及海外華商的民族主義,1919-1941(Trading with the “Enemy”? Hong Kong Bourgeoisie and Chinese Nationalism during the Two Wars, 1919-1941), Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives, vol. 9 (Fall 2015): 170-196.

介於閩南人與日本籍民之間:日本南進政策裡的臺灣人,1912-1941 (Between Southern Fujian Networks and Japanese Colonial Subjects: Taiwanese in Japan’s Southward Expansion),《海外華人研究》Journal of Overseas Chinese Studies, vol. 8 (2013): 117-145. 

『反』歐洲中心主義世界體系論戰裡的中國與世界 (China and the World in the ‘Anti-Eurocentric’ World-System Debates) 《新史學》 (New History), vol. 13, no. 3 (Sept. 2002): 241-246.

EDITED JOURNAL

Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives, vol. 11, no. 1: Special Issue, Overseas Chinese and Global Port-Cities (March 2017).

SELECTED BOOK REVIEWS

Karen Teoh, Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s-1960s (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2018), Journal of Asian Studies, May 2020 issue. [forthcoming]

Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang eds., Sea Rovers, Silver and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), China Review International Vol. 23 (2016 issue; published in 2018), no. 2: 133-138.

Tonio Andrade. How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish and Han Civilization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University, 2008). For Journal of World-System Research Vol. 17 (2011), no. 1: 266-268.