Professor James Gerien-Chen (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2019) is a historian of modern Japan, China, and Taiwan with research and teaching interests in comparative empires and imperialism; migration and diaspora; and borderlands and urban history. His current book project examines Japanese imperial expansion in colonial Taiwan and the port cities of south China and Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. He traces the migration of Japanese subjects from colonial Taiwan across the South China Sea littoral and reconstructs legal and diplomatic debates between Chinese and Japanese officials over these subjects’ nationality. By doing so, he shows how these subjects’ patterns of mobility and the legal categories that emerged from it shaped Japanese imperialism, Chinese state formation, and networks of overseas Chinese trade and migration. His research for this project in Japan, China, and Taiwan has received support from the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies/Henry Luce Foundation, among others. He offers survey courses on modern Japan and East Asia and thematic courses on empires and imperialism, migration, borderlands, and capitalism. Before joining the History Department at the University of Florida, he was the Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.