Catherine Tsai

Catherine Tsai is a historian of modern Japan, with an interest in the colonial and postwar experiences of Taiwanese and Okinawans. Her dissertation focuses on the agrarian development of the Yaeyama Islands, the southernmost archipelago of Okinawa, under Japanese empire and American Occupation. It argues that both Japanese and American metropolitan desires for tropical products not only prompted the exploration and exploitation of the islands’ resources, but also reshaped the economic and environmental landscape to create a specific form of tropicality modeled after Taiwan. Catherine received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University (2025). She received a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Relations from the University of California, Davis. Her work has received the support of the Japan Foundation, the Center for Chinese Studies (Taiwan), and the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard.