Affiliated Departments & Programs

Lin Li is a gender historian of East Asia. Adopting a transnational and intersectional methodology, Li is interested in the dynamic interactions among structural injustice, historical memory, and popular culture. Li's research and teaching center on two main themes: first, the production of structural violence along the lines of gender, ethnicity and disability across the Japanese empire. Second, the representation of this violence within historical memory and popular culture in the Asia-Pacific from the Cold War onward. 

Adopting a transnational and intersectional methodology, Li is interested in the dynamic interactions among structural injustice, historical memory and popular culture. Li is currently preparing a monograph that examines the emergence and struggle over trans-Pacific historical memories of the “comfort women” system, a euphemism for a system of Japanese military sexual slavery. 

Li received a Ph.D. in East Asian history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a minor in gender and women’s studies and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Prior to Kenyon, Li worked as an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Li currently serves as the co-chair of National Women’s Studies Association’s North American Asian Feminist Collective caucus. 

For the latest updates on Li's research, please visit kenyon.academia.edu/LinLi.

Areas of Expertise

Gender; East Asia; historical memory; popular culture 

Education

2020 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ of Wisconsin-Madison

Courses Recently Taught

The arrival of Portuguese ships off the coasts of China and Japan in the 16th century, followed by other European merchants, turned East Asia into a major theater of events shaping the emerging modern age. This course examines the sources and dynamics of change -- social, economic, geopolitical and cultural -- in the local and intramural arenas of East Asia as its economies and peoples became entangled in the rise and expansion of Euro-American imperial enterprises. The changes were violent and transformative, leaving deep impressions. Local understandings of past events continue to animate domestic politics and regional relations in the global competition for survival today. Focusing on China, Korea and Japan (acknowledging that the Philippines was the first real European colony in East Asia, and Vietnam the second), the class explores the processes of becoming modern for individuals, state and the region, and the diverse interpretations of those processes. This counts toward the modern and Asia/Africa requirements and the colonial/imperial field for the major. Offered every or every other year.

This course focuses on China, Korea and Japan before the rise of European maritime dominance (from the 16th century on), and the region's role in the early globalization of world exchange. East Asia emerged as a coherent cultural area in the first millennium C.E., with the introduction and spread of Buddhism, a religion whose faith and associated practices profoundly stamped the physical and human landscape of the region. Significant shifts in the 12th to 18th centuries C.E. highlight the Confucianization of family, gender, politics and kingship during these later centuries. The Mongol and Manchu conquests of the 13th and 17th centuries mark key transition points in this process, as well as in shaping regional and global relationships of exchange. This counts toward the premodern and Asia/Africa requirements for the major. No prerequisite. Offered every other year.

This course focuses on the conceptual frameworks used by historians and on debates within the profession about the nature of the past and the best way to write about it. The seminar prepares students of history to be productive researchers, insightful readers and effective writers. The seminar is required for history majors and should be completed before the senior year. Open only to sophomores and juniors. This counts toward the practice and theory requirement for the major. Declared history or international studies major only.