Nianshen Song is Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Asian Studies Program at UMBC. His research and teaching focus on late imperial and modern China, with special interest in China’s ethnic frontiers, East Asian trans-regional networks, historical geography, and international relations. He is the author of Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which explores the making of the China-Korean boundary and the Korean diaspora society in Northeast China. His articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of Asian Studies, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Research, and The Asia-Pacific Journal, among others. His next book project “The West Stupa: Three and Half Centuries of a Chinese Neighborhood”, aims to examine the evolution of East Asia from the nearly 400 years’ transformation of a small urban space. Dr. Song has also published many academic articles in Chinese language. His Chinese monograph Faxian dongya (Discovering East Asia) (Beijing: New Star Press, 2018; Taipei: Linking Publishing Company, 2019; Hong Kong: Open Page, 2019) rethinks East Asia’s intricate relations with global modernity from the 16th century onward. His grants and awards include the Dean’s Research Fund (UMBC, 2019), the New Writers of the Year Award (Amazon China, 2018), Korean Studies Grants (The Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 2017), The American Geographical Society Library Fellowship (2017), and the Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship: InterAsian Contexts and Connections (Social Science Research Council, 2013).
At UMBC, Dr. Song offers a broad range of classes, including “HIST 384: Viewing History through Maps: East Asia in Native and European Cartography,” “HIST 103: East Asian Civilization,” “HIST 390: Wars in 20th Century East Asia,” “HIST 479/689: China’s Long Revolution,” and “HIST 480/680: Mao and After: History of Contemporary China.” He mentors both B.A. and M.A. students.
Office: 520 Fine Arts Building
Contact: 410-455-2031 | nianshen@umbc.edu