Adam Cathcart

Adam Cathcart, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where he teaches courses on modern China, Korea, and the history of Sino-Japanese relations.

His research and publication program falls into three broad categories:

1. Sino-North Korean relations, encompassing borderlands, the Korean War, North Korea in the late 1940s, and Chinese Koreans in Yanbian.

2. Sino-Japanese relations, with research on war crimes in the late 1930s, China’s attempts to steer the internationalization of the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945-1952), the aftermath of Japanese bacteriological weapons research in Northeast China, the impact of the Korean War, and reception of and propaganda about rehabilitated Japanese war criminals in China in the 1950s.

3. East-West Cultural Relations, including Sino-German and Sino-French relations and cultural exchanges in the early Cold War, musical diplomacy in the 1970s, and propaganda in both the Second World War (Sino-Japanese competition in wartime Germany) and the Cold War.

In the Gulou district, Beijing, 2009 — Photo courtesy 奚青

Overlooking Musan, DPRK, at the Tumen River (Yanbian-North Hamgyong border) – photo by Chuck Kraus, 2007

Professional Biography:  Adam Cathcart earned his doctorate in contemporary East Asian history from Ohio University, where he focused on Cold War history and the international history of the Chinese civil war (1945-1950).  His dissertation focused on Chinese interactions with the U.S. occupation of Japan (1945-1952), and was written under the direction of Donald Jordan, a foremost American historian of Sino-Japanese economic and military interactions in the early 1930s. At Ohio, Cathcart studied East Asian art history as his cognate field, working with Professor Shen Kuiyi (University of California-San Diego) on several projects concerning Chinese political cartoons which resulted in publication.  He also began his classroom teaching career, doing a great deal of lecturing.

Cathcart subsequently became an assistant professor of history at Hiram College, a small liberal arts college near Cleveland, Ohio, known for its emphasis on innovative teaching and independent student research.  At Hiram, Cathcart won several teaching awards, developed classes like “Music and War”, taught writing seminars for freshmen, and won an ASIANetwork-Freeman Foundation Student-Faculty Research Fellowship which funded a trip for he and four advanced students to Northeast China and Beijing for extensive archival and field research.  (Of those four students, two are now pursuing PhDs in East Asian history, one spent a year at a prestigious graduate school before pivoting into the U.S. Air Force, and another spent two years teaching in Japan.)

In 2007, he took a post in the history department at Pacific Lutheran University, a larger private university in Tacoma, Washington.  (Hiram had about 800 students at the time, whereas PLU had and maintains an enrollment of about 3,200 undergraduates.)  In response to the school’s active Holocaust Studies program, which creates a great deal of student interest in questions like war crimes, genocide, and foreign occupation, Cathcart developed courses on World War II in East Asia and a research seminar on Japanese war crimes. He also began to do research on the Rape of Nanking, done joint lectures about Nanking and Buchenwald with researchers from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and travelled with students to the Nanking Massacre Memorial in the PRC.  In 2009, he was  able to bring Joshua Fogel to PLU for the Walter Schnackenberg Memorial Lecture about Nanking controversy.

The PLU Chinese Studies Program has been another very dynamic program in which Cathcart has been involved since arriving in Tacoma. His courses on Chinese intellectual history, the history of the Chinese Communist Party, the history of Tibet as part of the PRC, and research seminars on the Cold War in East Asia are part of the historical range of courses in which students can participate, and, often, do original historical research.   In fall 2010, he served as the site director of Pacific Lutheran University’s gateway program at Sichuan University in the city of Chengdu, PRC, bringing students to Tibet.

In addition to his core teaching about China and Sino-Japanese relations during World War II, Cathcart teaches a course on Modern Korea at Pacific Lutheran and maintains an active research program in the area of China’s relations with North Korea.  As an extention of his teaching and scholarly work in this area, he set up and serves as the editor of the website SinoNK.com.

Adam Cathcart lives in Seattle’s dynamic “International District” (Chinatown) in a historic Japanese hotel built in 1910.  When not in Seattle, he tends to be in Chengdu (Sichuan province, PRC) or Berlin.  He is originally from Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota, with family roots in Duluth and southern Sweden.  After two years of intensive liberal arts studies at St. Olaf College, Cathcart completed his undergraduate degree in cello performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Case Western Reserve University, where he began his studies of the Chinese language and lived with Tibetan scholars.

Adam Cathcart in Shanghai, December 10, 2011

Contact information:

cathcaaj@plu.edu

Mailing address: Adam Cathcart, Xavier Hall 233, Department of History, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, 98447, USA