Geonjoon Bae
Geonjoon Bae received his BA and MA in history from Sogang University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Chinese history at Beijing Normal University. His research interests include constitutional thought and constitution-making in modern China, third forces, ethnic minorities, and digital history. He is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on constitution-making in modern China. More recently, he has been exploring digital methods for the collection, structuring, analysis, and sharing of modern Chinese historical sources. He has published articles and coauthored volumes on modern Chinese constitutional thought, ethnic minorities, and digital history.
Beijing Normal 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.