John Chen
Current Position:
Assistant Professor of History, California State University Bakersfield
Teaching Areas:
Chinese, East Asian, Sino-Islamic, and world history, plus departmental courses
Previous Positions:
(1) California State University Long Beach, Lecturer in History, spring 2022 (remotely)
(2) California State University Bakersfield, Lecturer in History, AY2021-22 (remotely and in person)
(3) Whittier College, Adjunct in History, AY2021-22 (in person)
(4) NYU Shanghai, Visiting Assistant Professor, Global China Studies, AY2020-21 (remotely)
(5) St. Joseph's College Brooklyn, Adjunct in History, 2019-20 (remotely and in person)
(6) Columbia University, Wm. Theodore de Bary Postdoctoral Fellow, East Asian Languages and Cultures, AY2018-20 (remotely and in person)
Teaching Areas:
Chinese, East Asian, Sino-Islamic, Middle Eastern, and world/global history
Education:
(1) Columbia University, PhD, History, 2018
(2) American University in Cairo - Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), Arabic language certificate, 2009
(3) Harvard University, AB, History and Arabic, 2008
Research:
I am a historian of Islam and Muslims in China. I am interested in mobility and complex identities as well as the relationships between religion, race, majoritarianism, and political power. I am working on my first book, which examines counterintuitive connections between Islamic transnationalism and Chinese nationalism and will deepen understandings of Islamophobia and the oppression of Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in present-day China. I conducted two years of research in China as well as Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, and previously lived in Egypt for a year and a half of Arabic language study. My work has been supported by Fulbright, FLAS, and other sources, and has been published in journals of Islamic, Asian, and Afro-Asian studies.
Additional areas of research and teaching interest include global histories of religion, histories of Islamic medicine, histories of Chinese migration, and histories of Afro-Asianism.
Supervisors: Rashid Khalidi, Eugenia Lean, Marwa Elshakry
Assistant Professor of History, California State University Bakersfield
Teaching Areas:
Chinese, East Asian, Sino-Islamic, and world history, plus departmental courses
Previous Positions:
(1) California State University Long Beach, Lecturer in History, spring 2022 (remotely)
(2) California State University Bakersfield, Lecturer in History, AY2021-22 (remotely and in person)
(3) Whittier College, Adjunct in History, AY2021-22 (in person)
(4) NYU Shanghai, Visiting Assistant Professor, Global China Studies, AY2020-21 (remotely)
(5) St. Joseph's College Brooklyn, Adjunct in History, 2019-20 (remotely and in person)
(6) Columbia University, Wm. Theodore de Bary Postdoctoral Fellow, East Asian Languages and Cultures, AY2018-20 (remotely and in person)
Teaching Areas:
Chinese, East Asian, Sino-Islamic, Middle Eastern, and world/global history
Education:
(1) Columbia University, PhD, History, 2018
(2) American University in Cairo - Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), Arabic language certificate, 2009
(3) Harvard University, AB, History and Arabic, 2008
Research:
I am a historian of Islam and Muslims in China. I am interested in mobility and complex identities as well as the relationships between religion, race, majoritarianism, and political power. I am working on my first book, which examines counterintuitive connections between Islamic transnationalism and Chinese nationalism and will deepen understandings of Islamophobia and the oppression of Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in present-day China. I conducted two years of research in China as well as Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, and previously lived in Egypt for a year and a half of Arabic language study. My work has been supported by Fulbright, FLAS, and other sources, and has been published in journals of Islamic, Asian, and Afro-Asian studies.
Additional areas of research and teaching interest include global histories of religion, histories of Islamic medicine, histories of Chinese migration, and histories of Afro-Asianism.
Supervisors: Rashid Khalidi, Eugenia Lean, Marwa Elshakry
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Articles by John Chen
Building on diverse fields including Chinese, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and global history, this essay seeks to decouple Chinese Muslim history from narratives of marginalization and to decouple histories of China and the Middle East from the fraught encounter between “West” and “non-West.” Through its reading of Tawāḍuʿ Pang’s China and Islam, it also attempts to recall a now unfamiliar world in which the nation-state did not yet enjoy the dominance it achieved once decolonization was fully underway.
Workshops by John Chen
Syllabi by John Chen
This seminar asks what Chinese history tells us about global history and vice versa. In U.S. academia, “China and the world” has mostly meant China and the West. Meanwhile, in Chinese schools today, Chinese history is not included as part of world history. This seminar therefore invites you to develop your own approaches to the question of China’s global histories from perspectives such as trade, migration, empire and imperialism, war and conquest, crafts and circulation, religion, gender, science, ideas, and modern nation-building. Using numerous primary sources, we will discuss the agency of individuals and states; the usefulness of “space” as a tool of analysis; and the complexities of China’s global role, past and present. We will not only challenge Eurocentric, Sinocentric, and nation-based methodologies, but also push toward new narratives and conceptual vocabularies that aspire to the genuinely global.
This seminar offers multiple ways of understanding Chinese, Islamic, and global history, and illuminates aspects of contemporary Chinese state and society, intra-Asian exchange, and international relations. It will encourage you to think (and think again) about both interconnectedness and difference in the context of greater Asia. It will demand that you look beyond the framework of the nation-state, but will also ask you to contemplate how nationalisms have shaped understandings of the pre-national past. It will invite you, furthermore, to consider whether our basic definitions of “China” and “Islam” adequately account for the connected histories we will discuss. Specific themes will include community formation, material exchange, texts and transculturation, art and architecture, religious thought and practice, border-crossing and mobility, border-making and inequalities, state-building and state-minority relations, the transformations and disruptions of the European colonial era, the transition from dynastic empires to modern nation-states, processes of ethnicization and minoritization, and the “presence of the past.”
Conference Presentations by John Chen
This paper focuses on Hai's Chinese- and Arabic-language writings from Lucknow (early 1930s) and Cairo (mid- to late 1930s). The only Chinese Muslim known to have studied in India, and one of only a few dozen to have studied in Egypt, Hai is unique yet representative, illuminating the limits and possibilities, geographical and conceptual, of interwar Islamic transnationalism. In particular, his Lucknow writings highlight the fact that for both Indian and Chinese Muslims, it was not the abstract tension per se between national and religious loyalties, but more specifically the national territorialization of formerly fluid spaces—the Muslim-dominated northwestern frontiers of both countries—that precluded a more organic form of Islamic transnationalism. Hai’s translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s “Allahabad Address,” conventionally credited with inspiring the “idea” of Pakistan, appears to have been a turning point that drove home the significance of nationalized territory for Islam. Thereafter, Hai’s Cairo writings exhibited a definite shift away from contemporary politics and toward the history of Islam, particularly in his history of Sino-Arab relations, al-ʿAlāqāt bayn al-ʿarab wa-l-ṣīn. Hai remained dedicated to the ideal of Islamic unity throughout the first half of his life, but expressed that ideal first in a political and later in a historical mode—and differently in Arabic versus in Chinese.
I argue that Islamic reformist thought articulated in the Arab Middle East—stressing both reason and revival—formed the spring from which flowed the Chinese Azharites’ hopes for self-understanding and sociopolitical renewal. Furthermore, despite its ambivalent stance toward the nation-state, elements of this thought were nevertheless co-opted by the nascent Afro-Asian Movement, illustrating the often-overlooked intellectual debt of Third Worldism to Islamic reformism. Utilizing rare Arabic and Chinese sources and building on diverse fields including Chinese, Islamic, and global history, this paper decouples histories of Chinese Islam from narratives of national consolidation and ethnic marginalization, histories of Islamic reformism from the “faith-versus-reason” debate, and histories of China and the Middle East from the fraught encounter between “metropole and colony” or “West and Rest.”
Book Reviews by John Chen
Dissertation Abstract by John Chen
Podcasts by John Chen
Building on diverse fields including Chinese, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and global history, this essay seeks to decouple Chinese Muslim history from narratives of marginalization and to decouple histories of China and the Middle East from the fraught encounter between “West” and “non-West.” Through its reading of Tawāḍuʿ Pang’s China and Islam, it also attempts to recall a now unfamiliar world in which the nation-state did not yet enjoy the dominance it achieved once decolonization was fully underway.
This seminar asks what Chinese history tells us about global history and vice versa. In U.S. academia, “China and the world” has mostly meant China and the West. Meanwhile, in Chinese schools today, Chinese history is not included as part of world history. This seminar therefore invites you to develop your own approaches to the question of China’s global histories from perspectives such as trade, migration, empire and imperialism, war and conquest, crafts and circulation, religion, gender, science, ideas, and modern nation-building. Using numerous primary sources, we will discuss the agency of individuals and states; the usefulness of “space” as a tool of analysis; and the complexities of China’s global role, past and present. We will not only challenge Eurocentric, Sinocentric, and nation-based methodologies, but also push toward new narratives and conceptual vocabularies that aspire to the genuinely global.
This seminar offers multiple ways of understanding Chinese, Islamic, and global history, and illuminates aspects of contemporary Chinese state and society, intra-Asian exchange, and international relations. It will encourage you to think (and think again) about both interconnectedness and difference in the context of greater Asia. It will demand that you look beyond the framework of the nation-state, but will also ask you to contemplate how nationalisms have shaped understandings of the pre-national past. It will invite you, furthermore, to consider whether our basic definitions of “China” and “Islam” adequately account for the connected histories we will discuss. Specific themes will include community formation, material exchange, texts and transculturation, art and architecture, religious thought and practice, border-crossing and mobility, border-making and inequalities, state-building and state-minority relations, the transformations and disruptions of the European colonial era, the transition from dynastic empires to modern nation-states, processes of ethnicization and minoritization, and the “presence of the past.”
This paper focuses on Hai's Chinese- and Arabic-language writings from Lucknow (early 1930s) and Cairo (mid- to late 1930s). The only Chinese Muslim known to have studied in India, and one of only a few dozen to have studied in Egypt, Hai is unique yet representative, illuminating the limits and possibilities, geographical and conceptual, of interwar Islamic transnationalism. In particular, his Lucknow writings highlight the fact that for both Indian and Chinese Muslims, it was not the abstract tension per se between national and religious loyalties, but more specifically the national territorialization of formerly fluid spaces—the Muslim-dominated northwestern frontiers of both countries—that precluded a more organic form of Islamic transnationalism. Hai’s translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s “Allahabad Address,” conventionally credited with inspiring the “idea” of Pakistan, appears to have been a turning point that drove home the significance of nationalized territory for Islam. Thereafter, Hai’s Cairo writings exhibited a definite shift away from contemporary politics and toward the history of Islam, particularly in his history of Sino-Arab relations, al-ʿAlāqāt bayn al-ʿarab wa-l-ṣīn. Hai remained dedicated to the ideal of Islamic unity throughout the first half of his life, but expressed that ideal first in a political and later in a historical mode—and differently in Arabic versus in Chinese.
I argue that Islamic reformist thought articulated in the Arab Middle East—stressing both reason and revival—formed the spring from which flowed the Chinese Azharites’ hopes for self-understanding and sociopolitical renewal. Furthermore, despite its ambivalent stance toward the nation-state, elements of this thought were nevertheless co-opted by the nascent Afro-Asian Movement, illustrating the often-overlooked intellectual debt of Third Worldism to Islamic reformism. Utilizing rare Arabic and Chinese sources and building on diverse fields including Chinese, Islamic, and global history, this paper decouples histories of Chinese Islam from narratives of national consolidation and ethnic marginalization, histories of Islamic reformism from the “faith-versus-reason” debate, and histories of China and the Middle East from the fraught encounter between “metropole and colony” or “West and Rest.”