Minseok Jang
Minseok Jang is a historian of environment, business, and technology. He earned his Ph.D. from State University of New York, Albany, in 2026, with a focus on the global petroleum industry. His research examines the material risks of energy transitions and the social construction of technological standards. He has published in leading journals, including Business History Review and Technology and Culture. He is currently a lecturer at Korea University.
Korea 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.