About the East Asia Center at UCSB

The East Asia Center (EAC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara promotes interdisciplinary research and cultural events on East Asia. It brings together UCSB faculty, students, and the wider local public with leading scholars and other creative individuals from other institutions in order to create a critical and nurturing community for the study of East Asia. EAC strives to collaborate with a range of departments, individuals and other units in the Humanities, Social Sciences and beyond that are invested in education and public understanding of East Asia. EAC invests in relationships between UCSB and the East Asian region as well as the academy and the public. EAC is housed within the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (ISBER) at UC Santa Barbara. 

To be added to the UCSB East Asia Center email listserv, please email the EAC academic coordinator, Dr. Shiva Balaghi at sbalaghi@ucsb.edu.

 

EAC Director

East Asia Center Director Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. McDonald is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (California, 2017) and co-director of the NEH-funded digital spatial history project, Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History (https://bodiesandstructures.org). In addition to her work with EAC, Dr. McDonald currently serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the field’s flagship journal, Journal of Asian Studies.