Chui Joe Tham

Research Topic

Writing Dynastic Transition: Unofficial, Contemporary Historical Writing in Early Modern East Asia

Supervisor: Professor Sho Konishi

My research focuses on unofficial, contemporary historical writing about the Ming-Qing transition in China, Japan, and Korea from the seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries. I argue in my dissertation that the Ming-Qing transition saw a proliferation of non-state commissioned records of the history of the transition, the authors of which hailed from all over East Asia, and whom further placed an emphasis on contemporary, up-to-date information. This indicates that alongside a trend toward cultural centrality and proto-nationalism which scholars have traditionally associated with the dynastic transition and its impact on East Asian intellectual culture, there existed a parallel trend towards contemporaneity, or the notion of a shared present.

Other research interests and activities:

I have previously undertaken research into comparative legitimation theories in seventeenth-century China and England, and also into the literature on the Malayan Emergency (twentieth century) in Malay, Chinese, and English.

I am interested in contemporaneity as a global trend with different iterations in different regions across the world. The writing of contemporary history about the Ming-Qing transition may benefit from study in context of newsbooks and contemporary histories in early modern Europe about the Thirty Years' War, or in England about the English Civil War.