Dr Chui Joe Tham

Postdoctoral Associate Member/Geiss Hsu Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Ming Studies (University of British Columbia)

chui-joe.tham@history.ox.ac.uk

I am an historian of historical writing in East Asia between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My research interests center on the transnational intellectual connections between polities in East Asia, and the global early modern history of knowledge-production more broadly.

Research Interests

I received my DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in September 2025. Mydoctoral dissertation explored the writing and circulation of contemporary historical works about the Ming-Qing dynastic transition (1618-1683) in Ming China, Joseon Korea, and Tokugawa Japan. Through the lens of non-state-commissioned works compiled across borders and in multiple linguistic mediums, I demonstrated the emergence of an intellectual culture of contemporaneity in early modern East Asia.

As a Geiss Hsu Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Ming Studies at the University of British Columbia (2025-2027), I will be working on editing her dissertation into a book for publication. I will also embark on a new research project, which will explore the processes underpinning the writing of transnational histories, that is to say, histories of more than one polity, in China, Korea, and Japan from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

The Transnational Historiography of a Dynastic Transition: Writing the Ming-Qing Transition in Seventeenth-Century China, Korea, and Japan’ in Modern Asian Studies 57, no. 3 (2023): 776–807

The Ming-Qing transition (1618–1683), a dynastic upheaval that not only consumed much of China, but also saw the Qing invasion of Joseon Korea and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan, was a source of inspiration for writers across East Asia. Unofficial, contemporary histories written by Ming and early Qing subjects made their way by land and sea to Korea and Japan, where they were either adapted for domestic audiences or used as the basis for new unofficial histories of the dynastic transition.

Dr Chui Joe Tham

Featured Publications

The Transnational Historiography of a Dynastic Transition: Writing the Ming-Qing Transition in Seventeenth-Century China, Korea, and Japan’ in Modern Asian Studies 57, no. 3 (2023): 776–807