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Dr Adam Cathcart

BM (Case Western Reserve) MA, PhD (Ohio)

Lecturer in Asian History

Email: a.cathcart@qub.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 3763
Office: 14UQ.G06

 

Biography:

Adam Cathcart's interests in East Asia were first kindled in 1987, when he toured Japan with the Minnesota Boychoir (USA). He went on to study Chinese language and earn a joint degree at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Working under the tutelage of Donald Jordan, a specialist in Sino-Japanese relations in the Republican era, Cathcart earned his MA and PhD in East Asian history was subsequently appointed to the faculty at Hiram College.  In 2007 he moved to Seattle and became an assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University, where he taught courses in history and Chinese Studies, was awarded tenure, and served as PLU's Site Director at Sichuan University, Chengdu.  In 2010 he won China Quarterly's Gordon White Prize for his research on the aftermath of Japanese war crimes in China.  

Research Interests:

Manchuria, contemporary history of Sino-Japanese relations, Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives (1948-1960), Sino-North Korean relations and borderlands, the Korean War, the cultural Cold War, North Korea's cultural diplomacy, political musicology.

Selected Publications:

(2011). “The Bonds of Brotherhood: New Evidence of Sino-North Korean Exchanges, 1950-1954,” with Charles Kraus, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 27-51. 

(2010). “Nationalism and Ethnic Identity in the Sino-Korean Border Region of Yanbian, 1945-1950,” Korean Studies Vol. 34, 25-53. 

(2010). ‘Walls as Multivalent Icons in the early People’s Republic’ in Chinese Walls in Time and Space: History, Medicine, Media, Law, Art, and Literature. Saussy, H. (ed.). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 175-210.

(2009). “’To Serve Revenge for the Dead’: Chinese Communist Reflections of the War of Resistance in the PRC Foreign Ministry Archive, 1949-1956,” with Patricia Nash, China Quarterly No. 200 (December): 1053-1070.

(2009).  “North Korean Hip Hop?  Reflections on Musical Diplomacy and the DPRK,” Acta Koreana, Vol. 12, No. 2 (December): 1-19.   

(2009). “War Criminals and the Road to Sino-Japanese Normalization: Zhou Enlai and the Shenyang Trials, 1954-1956,” with Patricia Nash, Twentieth-Century China 34:2 (April): 89-111.

(2009). “’Against Invisible Enemies’: Japanese Bacteriological Weapons in China’s Cold War, 1949-1952,” Chinese Historical Review Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring): 101-129.

(2008).  “Peripheral Influence: The Sinuiju Student Incident and the Soviet Occupation of North Korea, 1945-1947,” with Charles Kraus, Journal of Korean Studies Vol. 13, No. 1 (Fall), 1-28.

 

Teaching:

Dr Cathcart teaches on the following modules:

HIS1003 World War II in East Asia

HIS3089 Cold War in Asia


Regular Research Sites/Fieldwork:

Liaoning/Jilin, and Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region, PRC

Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive, Beijing, PRC

Chengdu, Sichuan province, PRC

Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany

Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, California, USA


Related Websites:

SinoNK.com (edited web journal)

SinoMondiale (personal website)