Donghyuk Kim
Donghyuk Kim completed his PhD in History at the University of Edinburgh in 2025, with a thesis titled 'British Missionary Encounters in the Princely State of Mysore, 1820–1910.' He currently teaches history at Seoul National University and Ewha Womans University. His research focuses on the history of the British Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in the dynamic interplay between empire and religion in colonial South Asia.
Ewha Womans University
Session
This panel examines a central paradox of modern world history: encounters, circulation, and mobility often produced not openness, but new boundaries of culture, politics, and economy. Spanning modern China, colonial India, the Burma–China borderlands, and late nineteenth-century Europe, the panel explores how ideas, religious practices, peoples, and commodities moved across regions while being translated, contested, and regulated in local settings. The papers show how foreign constitutional models in China were reinterpreted rather than simply adopted; how missionary networks in Mysore intensified cultural division even as they expanded contact; how American Protestant expansion reshaped minority identities across imperial borderlands; and how the circulation of American kerosene generated trade barriers through the language of risk and safety. Taken together, these presentations highlight how modern connectivity became a means of producing new forms of exclusion, differentiation, and boundary-making.