Short Biography
Torsten Weber is a historian of modern and contemporary East Asia specializing in the history of Japanese-Chinese relations and interactions. Trained in History and East Asian Studies at the universities of Mainz, Shanghai (Fudan), London (SOAS), and Leiden, he received his Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from Heidelberg University in 2012. His recent monograph Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan. Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave Transnational History Series, 2018) analyzes how ‘Asia’ as a contested concept in mainstream public discourse has challenged political and epistemological hierarchies in East Asia and the world.
Since 2013, Torsten has been a Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. At the DIJ, Torsten’s research includes projects on the First World War and the interwar period in East Asian history, happiness in modern Japan’s socio-political discourse, war memory, and the ‘history wars’ in East Asia. For his research project on John Rabe’s war diaries he was awarded a three-year research grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Select Publications
- 2018
Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan. Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912-1933 (Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 407 p.
- 2018
Apology Failures: Japanese Strategies in Dealing with its Imperialist Past Towards China and Korea
In: B. Bevernage / N. Wouters (Ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945. London: Palgrave. pp. 801-816. - 2017
From Versailles to Shanghai: Pan-Asianist Legacies of the Paris Peace Conference and the Failure of Asianism from Below
In: Zachmann, Urs Matthias (Ed.) Asia After Versailles. Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order 1919-1933. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 77-97.
Curriculum vitae
available upon request