Shellen Xiao Wu is professor and L.H. Gipson Chair in Transnational History at Lehigh University. Her new book, Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2023) traces the global history of the frontier in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on China.

Her first book, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 2015), argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

Wu has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, the National Humanities Center, the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, Fulbright, and the Mellon Foundation. She has published articles in Nature, The American Historical Review, International History Review, and other leading journals in history, history of science, and Asian Studies.

Emily Mokros is an associate professor of Chinese history at the University of Kentucky.

Stefan Tanaka is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Throughout his career he has inquired into the uses of pasts and time in the writing of history, especially in Japan. This inquiry has led to three monographs, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993), New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and History without Chronology (2019, Open Access). He has also written several essays on historical narrative and digital media (for example, "The Old and New of Digital History," History and Theory [2022]). His current work explores what kinds of histories and understandings are possible when history is liberated from absolute (or classical) time.

Carl Kubler is a global historian of modern China and peoples of Chinese descent. His scholarship and teaching sit at the intersection of Chinese history, Asian American history, and diaspora studies and center on how the forces of trade, migration, and cross-cultural encounter shape everyday life, with particular emphasis on the history of contact between China and the West. Kubler’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Program, Henry Luce Foundation, and Association for Asian Studies, among others.

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