Kelly Hammond, assistant professor in the Department of History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a highly competitive Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Now in its fifth year, the fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies seeks to maintain the vitality of China Studies in North America through grants designed primarily for humanities scholars early in their careers.

Studies on and in China have developed over the last 30 years in the United States and Canada into a robust field, but current conditions pose daunting problems, especially for scholars just before and just after the dissertation. To address this situation, the program offers three competitions: Predissertation-Summer Travel Grants, Postdoctoral Fellowships, and Collaborative Reading-Workshop Grants. The postdoctoral fellowship is a $50,000 award.

Hammond will spend most of her time on the fellowship working on her book manuscript and plans to spend a few months in China in the spring of 2018 in order to complete some research at the newly re-opened Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing. 

In her book, "China's Muslims and Japan's Empire," Hammond argues that the constant reconfiguration of global networks in the Asia-Pacific region by imperial powers in the twentieth century had a lasting impact on the prevailing ethnic classifications within the People's Republic of China. She shows how Japanese imperialism partly enabled alternate visions of autonomy for Muslim minorities in China during an era of collaboration and internationalism.

Her research also highlights the global connections facilitated by Japanese imperialists with Muslims who lived under the shadow of occupation. Forging connections beyond the borders of occupied China, Muslims also served as mouthpieces of Japanese imperialism and provided the Japanese with the means to expand their political and cultural influence in the greater Islamic world.