Rui Hua

Rui Hua, Assistant Professor of History at Boston University, is a historian of law, empire, and the environment in modern East Asia. In addition to a deep fascination with the many transnational connections in this world region, he has a special obsession with a Northeast Asian borderland called Manchuria. His first book project, tentatively entitled “Peasants Versus Empires: Transnational Civil Justice and Socialist Decolonization in Manchuria, 1881-1957,” explores how the peasants, merchants, and vagabonds of the borderland shaped the inter-imperial rivalry between China, Japan, and Russia through law. Having performed detective work on hundreds of legal battles straddling many borders, he tells an alternative story about the emergence of Northeast Asian legal modernity in a world of vernacular legal engagements. He is also working on a second book project, which examines how the inhabitants of non-agrarian ecologies – human or otherwise – participated in the making of the Northeast Asian legal order in the twentieth century.