Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (楊孟軒) is Assistant Professor of East Asian History at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He completed his PhD in the Department of History, the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the massive human exodus out of China in the mid-twentieth century during and following the Chinese Communist victory to places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and North America. Using this research, particularly his work on the mainlanders in Taiwan, Yang attempts to reorient the historiography of the Chinese civil war, from discussing the success and failure of two revolutionary parties to the protracted social history of mass displacement and human suffering in the war’s aftermath. On the theory front, Yang proposes a “multiple-event” concept of trauma and memory production. The concept challenges the prevailing “single-event” notion of trauma that has originated from both the turn of the twentieth century Freudian psychoanalysis and Halbwachsian sociological memory studies. His first book, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, was published by Cambridge University Press (2020). He has also published related articles in China Perspectives, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Journal of Chinese History, Historical Reflections, and Taiwan Historical Research (臺灣史研究).

Yang is a recipient of multiple Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awards and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation grants, as well as a University of Texas Austin Institute for Historical Studies Fellowship and Taiwan Fellowship. In 2020, Yang was awarded University of Missouri, Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Research and Creative Activity Award, the highest recognition for research at the assistant level in University of Missouri. The Great Exodus from China was recently shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award.