Editorial Team

My interest in East Asia can be traced back to 1987, when I toured Japan as a soprano soloist on the Minnesota Boychoir’s tour of Japan. After obtaining a cello performance degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music and briefly working at the New World Symphony in Miami, I began my formal studies in East Asian history as a graduate student at Ohio University, where I studied with Donald Jordan (an expert on Republican China and Sino-Japanese conflict), and Shao Dan (an expert on Manchus and borderlands in northeast China). In 1998, I started studying the Chinese language and shortly thereafter began travelling regularly to northeast China and developed an interest in the Korean border region and Chinese borderlands.

My academic interests have largely been shaped by my students and simple chance encounters. I was lucky enough to get into the PRC Foreign Ministry soon after that facility opened in 2006 and produced a number of articles based on those materials, working together with Chuck Kraus and Patricia Nash (both of whom were my students at Hiram College). Having produced a dissertation on Chinese views of U.S.-occupied Japan, I then moved into war crimes trials from Tokyo to Shenyang, and I continue to work on legacies of Japanese empire in northeast Asia thanks to support from Barak Kushner and colleagues in the UK. My interest in the Korean border region with China has turned into a minor obsession, with the needs of various audiences dictating a rhythm of production of scholarship, journalism, think-tank reports, and speaking engagements. When Kim Jong-un took power in December 2011, along with Koreanist colleagues, I created an online scholarly portal (SinoNK.com) which has been a useful entry point and vehicle for analysis of the Chinese-North Korean relationship.

The arts remain an important part of my life, and I have produced a number of articles on the role of politics in the music of North Korea and China, including a recent prize-winning paper entitled ‘Death and Transfiguration: The Late Kim Jong-il Aesthetic and North Korean Cultural Production.’ with Pekka Korhonen (Popular Music and Society, October 2017). Tertiary research interests include Chinese and North Korean cartoons and posters, the CCP’s approach to Tibetan history narratives in both film and print, and German-Japanese cultural cooperation in the 1940s. As a cellist, I have premiered and performed Chinese contemporary music in Berlin, Cincinnati, and Chengdu, and have ambitions to write more about the role of Western string music in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

CV: https://adamcathcart.com/cv/

Robert Winstanley-Chesters is a geographer, Lecturer at the University of Leeds, Birkbeck, University of London and formerly a Research Fellow at Australian National University and a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Cambridge University (Beyond the Korean War). Robert obtained his doctorate from the University of Leeds with a thesis later published as “Environment, Politics and Ideology in North Korea” in 2014. Robert’s second monograph “New Goddesses of Mt Paektu: Gender, Violence, Myth and Transformation in Korean Landscapes” (co-authored with Victoria Ten) will be published in July 2019 by Lexington. His third ‘Vibrant Matters(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and her Neighbours’ will be published in December 2019 by Springer. Robert had published in a wide variety of peer reviewed academic journals including: North Korean Review, Capitalism Nature Socialism, the Extractive Industries and Society, Asian Cultural Studies and Asian Perspective. Robert is currently researching the geographies of Manchukuo and colonial Korea, fishing and animal/creaturely geographies in North Korea and the colonial mineralogical and forest inheritances of the Korean peninsula.