Dr Chui Joe Tham

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. My doctoral 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.