Research Update

Last week I received the proof of my paper about George H. Kerr that will come out in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations by the end of this year (I hope!). It's about his struggles to write about what he saw and experienced in postwar Taiwan--the events leading up to and immediately following the March Massacres of 1947. I was able to locate correspondence between Kerr and William Holland of the Institute of Pacific Relations that cleared up (though not entirely!) what happened to prevent the earlier version of what eventually became his most famous work, Formosa Betrayed. I'll let you know when that comes out.

In the meantime, I'm still working with my colleagues from Taiwan and Japan on the biography of Kerr. There have been some delays in the process (as is inevitably the case, I think), so I'm not sure when the book will be out, but it will probably be done next year. (Fingers crossed!)

I've also been invited to take part in a roundtable next summer about the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association's work in China and Taiwan. If our proposal is accepted, it'll be a chance for me to reconnect with the research I did (and the people I worked with) on Shansi in Taiwan. The last piece I wrote about that research was published in 2013 in a collection about Taiwan church history. It's interesting that this is coming back again at this point in my life. I wonder where it will lead...