Sakura Christmas

Sakura Christmas is the SSRC Transregional Fellow at Yale Inter-Asia Connections Program. She is an assistant professor of History and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Her research concerns the history of borderlands, environment, and imperialism in East Asia in the twentieth century. She received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2016. During her sabbatical, she will be a postdoctoral scholar at the InterAsia Connections Program and an affiliate fellow at the Agrarian Studies Program. While at Yale, she will be completing her first monograph, Nomadic Borderlands: Imperial Japan and the Origins of Ethnic Autonomy in China. Her book project focuses on the Japanese-led demarcation of a nomadic borderland between Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. Drawing on archival research in both Japan and China, Nomadic Borderlands examines how Japanese occupiers pursued radical solutions in population transfers and environmental planning to separate out their subjects by ethnicity and livelihood. Instead of only seeing the origins of Communist rule as forged in the fires of war against imperialism, she argues for the significance of the Japanese occupation in shaping the ethnic and ecological bounds of modern China.