Education
B.A. Sungkyunkwan University (2007)
M.A. Sungkyunkwan University (2010)
Ph.D. University of Toronto, History (2025)
Courses
- HIST 215 (S) LEC Modern Japan: 1600-1950
- HIST 217 (F) SEM A History of Colonialism: Colonial Korea under Japanese Rule
- HIST 317 (F) SEM History from the Periphery: Manchuria and the Modern World
- HIST 415 SEM Post War Japan (not offered 2026/27)
- HIST 491 (S) TUT Environment and Infrastructure in Transpacific Asia
More Information
Yehji Jeong (She/her) is a historian of modern East Asia. Her research and teaching interests include colonialism, governmentality, sovereignty, gender, law, racial politics, and the Japanese empire. At Williams, she teaches courses on modern East Asia and colonialism from a transnational perspective, spanning Japan, Korea, and Manchuria, with a focus on how experiences of modernity and colonialism in East Asia can be understood within a global historical context.
Her first book project, Bandits!: Sovereignty, Governmentality, and Racial Politics in Imperial Japan’s Manchuria, 1904–1945, investigates how the Japanese empire established its authority in Manchuria between 1904 and 1945. Using the figure of the “bandit”—a central concept problematized within Japan’s imperial discourse on Manchuria—as a critical lens, the project reveals how the empire articulated its legal, spatial, and racial logics of rule. It shows how Japanese imperial rule in Manchuria operated through the shifting interplay—and tensions—between sovereign and governmental power. In particular, it explores the fluidity of the “bandit” category and the anxieties of modern power, the politics behind the seemingly arbitrary use of multiple terms for “bandit,” and how Japanese imperial power mobilized the figure of the bandit as a means of asserting sovereignty and of racializing and managing the population.
Contact Info
Fall 2025 Class Hours
Mon / Thu – 1:10 pm to 2:25 pm
Wed – 1:10 pm to 3:50 pm
Fall 2025 Office Hours
Thu – 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
And By Appointment