Rebecca Nedostup is a historian of twentieth-century China and Taiwan based at Brown University in the United States. She works on displacement and emplacement; the social and political roles of the living and the dead in times of disruption; and transitional justice and heritage projects. Her first book, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity, looked at the modern categorization of religious practice and its social and political ramifications; it was short-listed for the ICAS Book Award in Humanities in 2011. She is currently writing Living and Dying in the Long War, on the making and unmaking of community among people displaced by conflict across China and Taiwan from the 1930s through the 1950s. Rebecca teaches on the social, political, and cultural history of modern China, Taiwan, and East Asia, including courses on popular culture; memory and transitional justice; borderlands history; and research methods. She is interested in historic preservation and critical archive studies, digital ontologies, and methods of sharing and “knowing” predigital, nondigital, and less accessible sources using digital tools. As faculty director of the Choices program, she collaborates with staff who produce accessible and research-informed history and current events curricula for secondary schools. During spring 2023 Rebecca was Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at IIAS and Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).
Also see, Rebecca Nedostup, Chair of Taiwan Studies at Leiden University and IIAS, February - June 2023.