Sinae Hyun
Sinae Hyun is a research professor in the Center for Korean Studies at Inha University, specializing in the Cold War, nationalism, and Southeast Asian studies. Her first book, Indigenizing the Cold War, was published by the University of Hawaii Press in April 2023. She has published several research articles on the Southeast Asian Cold War and ethnic minorities in the border areas in major academic journals, including Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Cold War History, and Asian Studies Review. She is currently preparing a book manuscript focusing on the histories of American Protestant missionaries in Southeast Asia and their dealings with overlapping empires of Britain, China, and "Others".
Inha 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.