Joshua Tan Hong Yi
Joshua Hong Yi Tan (陳鴻毅) was born and raised in Singapore, before pursuing higher education in Canada and the United States. He earned his Ph.D. in History in 2024 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in the histories of modern China and East Asia, American-East Asian relations, and Chinese migration and diaspora. His current book manuscript, tentatively titled Chinese International Students in the America’s Cold War: A Transpacific History (under advance contract with Columbia University Press), explores the role of diasporic Chinese students and intellectuals between the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia in remaking new universities in Cold War Asia. His writings have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and public-facing venues like the UC Humanities Research Institute’s foundry, Jom, and The Asian Review of Books.
Joshua’s broader research and teaching interests include histories of modern China and Asia, global migration and diaspora, and world Christianity. Now living in Singapore, he is working on two new book-length projects: (1) a biography of diasporic Chinese Christian intellectual and educator Wu Teh-Yao (吳德耀), and (2) a broader history of postwar Chinese Christian and missionary networks in the South Seas (Nanyang), tentatively titled: Cold War Missionaries: Afterlives of the Reluctant Exodus from China.
EDUCATION:
- University of California, Santa Cruz (Ph.D., 2024)
- University of British Columbia (M.A., 2018)
- New York University (B.A., 2016)
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
- Chinese Migration and Diaspora
- Cold War Asia
- World Christianity
- Global Higher Education
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
- “Nanyang University and the Cold War Origins of American Higher Education in Singapore,” Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming)
- “China Missionaries and Chinese Christians in the South Seas: Revisiting Singapore’s Nanyang University,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2026) (forthcoming)
- “Mediating Self and Nation: Diasporic Chinese Women in the ‘Singapore New Wave’,” Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2025): 69-97.
- “Whose World Is It? Global Educational Justice in an Age of Neoliberalism,” foundry (University of California Humanities Research Institute, 2025).
- Review of Hongshan Li, Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War, PRC History Review, No. 79 (May 2025).
- “Migration, Conversion, and Transnational Activism in a Vancouver Chinese Church,” in Fenggang Yang and Chris White eds., Christian Social Activism and Rule of Law in Chinese Societies (Lehigh University Press, 2021).