Advisor: Professor Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu

Bohan Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the United States in the Pacific world, Hawai‘i, and modern China. His dissertation examines the trans-Pacific endeavors of migrants, intellectuals, diplomats, and athletes in shaping Pan-Pacific internationalism in twentieth-century Hawai‘i. His article on African American–East Asian interactions received the 2026 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and is forthcoming in the Journal of American History. His second article on Chinese citizen diplomacy and Pan-Pacific internationalism in Hawai‘i is published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association. He has participated in Columbia University History Lab’s “Archives as Data” Institute in the Digital Humanities for Historians, the Wilson Center’s Cold War Archives Research Institute, the SHAFR Summer Institute, and the UT Austin Clements Center’s Summer Seminar in Statecraft and History, alongside Hawaiian language training at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. At Rice, he teaches “Hawai‘i and the U.S. Pacific Empire” for the First-Year Intensive Writing Seminar (FWIS) program and “Modern China” for the History Department. He is currently a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence and has served as a mentor for the School of Humanities’ Moody Undergraduate Research Fellowship and worked as an editorial assistant for the Journal of Southern History.