- Fellowship year:2019-2020
- University: University of Wisconsin- Madison
- Dissertation Topic/Category: Japan
- Dissertation Title: Marketing Japan's Global Gateways: Commerce, Crisis, and the Making of Civic Identities in Japan's Commercial Harbors, 1929-1944.
Using the ports of Yokohama and Nagasaki as case studies, I argue that local elites in these cities responded to the global economic and geopolitical crises of the 1930s by creating flexible urban identities that simultaneously accommodated local pride, militant nationalism, and "international community" based on whichever was deemed most beneficial to local economic development. Local elites reconciled these competing ideas by marketing their ports domestically and abroad as Japan's "gateways to the world," a malleable idea that these elites variously used to reshape local civic identities in service of city-first policies, liberal internationalism, and imperial autarky in the face of wrenching changes to the international order.