About

Kate McDonald is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara, with a Ph.D. from the University of California San Diego obtained in 2011. Her research explores the social, cultural, and technological history of mobility in twentieth-century Japan and the Japanese Empire. She focuses on the history of empire, modern Japan, and critical global history, with particular interest in spatial history and spatial humanities. McDonald's work includes examining forgotten technologies such as rickshaws and human-powered railways to revisit the history of mobility in modern Japan. She is actively involved in collaborative digital projects like Bodies and Structures, which deep-map modern East Asian history, and has published extensively, including the book 'Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan.' In addition to her research and teaching, she serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the Journal of Asian Studies and as a co-editor for the Studies in the History of Technology monograph series.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Humanities
• Law
• Economics
• Economy
• History
• Art history
• Library science
• Business
• Art
• Gender studies
• Geography
• Advertising
• Economic geography
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Economic history

Selected publications

• What Makes Transportation History

  The American Historical Review · 2025-10-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The idea that societies progress from rickshaw to railroad has been ubiquitous in discourses of colonialism and technological determinism since the nineteenth century. While historians of colonialism have debunked these discourses in specific cases, the question of why transportation came to be such a common sense measure of historical change has been left untouched. This article argues that “transportation” has a history. From eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political-economic philosophy in Europe, Japan, and the United States, to rickshaw puller movements in early twentieth-century Japan, to the emergence of transport devices as museum objects in the 1960s, “What Makes Transportation History” shows how transportation came to be understood both as the foundation for economic life and as a measure and maker of linear and irreversible change over time. This process did not exclude those who approached transportation as a livelihood. Rather, battles with rickshaw pullers and other transportation workers naturalized the idea that the needs of transport’s producers must be subordinated to the needs of transport’s consumers for modern societies to progress.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of <i>Doing Spatial History</i>

  Cultural History · 2024-03-28

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Review: Southeast Asia Under Japan

  Reviews in Digital Humanities · 2022-03-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A review of Southeast Asia Under Japan, a repository for diverse primary and secondary sources related to studying the occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, led by Sandeep Ray, Han Xing Yi, and Velusamy Sathiakumar Ragul Balaji

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980 by Gijs Mom

  Journal of world history · 2022-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980 by Gijs Mom Kate Mcdonald Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980. By gijs mom. New York: Berghahn, 2020. 688 pp. $199.00 (hardcover). By the 1920s, automobiles could be found in all parts of the world. To a large extent, regardless of locale, their use was limited to well-off leisure drivers or commercial truckers. By the 1990s, the automobile had become the dominant mode of transport in cities around the world. In Globalizing Automobilism, Gijs Mom seeks to connect these two narrative points in the history of the automobile. Most important, he seeks to do so by fully taking into account the globality of the automobile's history. As Mom argues, "the global expansion of mobility history … reveals a remarkable synchronicity" to the history of automobilism across regional and political contexts (p. 169). Globalizing Automobilism shows that the division of the world into "early" and "late" adopters of the automobile does not hold up under scrutiny. Instead, the history of the automobile is the history of a device that provided one of many "layers" of mobility in societies around the world. I will say this right away: Globalizing Automobilism is a tremendous achievement. Historians of mobility history who work outside of the context of the United States and Western Europe find ourselves, more often than not, screaming silently on the sidelines as the subjects of our study are treated as peripheral to the grand historical narratives of modern mobility technologies. The problem is not so much that experiences of people in Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East are explicitly excluded from the history of transport technologies. The problem is that these places are allowed to simply not appear in narrow, Euro- and US-centric histories of the automobile. Alternately, they are allowed to appear as regional case studies but not as drivers of the main narrative of the automobile's history. Mom is a specialist in analyzing how local conditions shape the development of technologies of automobility on a broader scale. He brings this expertise to bear productively on the global history of automobility. His award-winning first monograph, The Electric Vehicle (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), showed that the internal-combustion engine and the electric vehicle in fact co-evolved, until the cheaper price of internal-combustion cars ultimately tipped the commercial scales in its favor. He did so with remarkable attention to the details of vehicle usage in local contexts in the United States and [End Page 535] Europe and the technical elements of the devices themselves. His subsequent volume, Atlantic Automobilism, traced the trans-Atlantic history of automobile culture with similarly impressive archival and historiographical scope. If these earlier works tackled the questions of "why the internal-combustion engine" and "why do cars persist," Globalizing Automobilism asks how the "the automobile" produced local histories that appear so different as to be completely different stories, yet are in fact linked by their shared vehicle. Each of the three chapters analyzes an era of global automobility, from the adoption of the automobile in the early twentieth century through the "fragmenting" of automotive culture in the 1940s through the 1970s. Ultimately, Mom argues that the synchronicity and shared cultural traits of automobility in these many locales provide a powerful argument against the "diffusionist thesis," which imagines an automobile culture that originated in the West and spread to the Rest. Instead, Mom argues that the evidence "rather reinforces the alternative thesis of multiple mobilities … of fragmented, kaleidoscopic mobility cultures" (p. 564). Suturing these fragments back together, Mom finds that the history of global automobility is a history of affect as much as it is a history of technology and political economy. While middle classes around the globe routinized automobility, working classes also "carnivalized" the symbolic value of the automobile as an "adventure machine" (p. 566). Rather than treat these symbolic, "ostentatious" (p. 567) uses of the automobile as exemplars of the periphery, Mom uses them as an opportunity to re-read the history of postwar automobile culture in the West. There, he finds similarly ostentatious...

  PublisherDOI

• Edg Space Melbourne

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022-03-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  For the #1 building designers in Melbourne, EDG offers custom-tailored bespoke solutions for your architectural needs. We've created boutique commercial and residential properties across Australia. From conception, development to overseeing construction, experts at EDG Space Melbourne design spaces that meet your vision. Whether you're doing a major renovation, a rebuild, or a completely new build, our experience ensures premier service that will accommodate your design requirements. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation. https://www.edg.space/

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• Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train. <i>By</i> Jessamyn R. Abel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. 304 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover, $90.00. ISBN: 978-1-50361-038-5.

  The Business History Review · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Humanities
  • Art history

  Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train. By Jessamyn R. Abel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. 304 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover, $90.00. ISBN: 978-1-50361-038-5. - Volume 96 Issue 3

  PublisherDOI

• Looking for Empires: Japanese Colonialism and the Comparative Gaze

  Global and European Studies Institute (GESI), Universität Leipzig · 2021-03-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article surveys trends in recent English-language studies of Japanese imperialism and colonialism. Anglophone scholarship on comparative Japanese colonialism has shifted approaches in recent years. The early generation of comparative scholarship emphasized inter-imperial and inter-regional comparison. Newer scholarship builds comparative categories from the grounded analysis of liminal and transgressive subjects. Overall, the field increasingly represents the Japanese empire not as a singular phenomenon or a collection of distinct colony-metropole relationships. Instead, the field approaches the study of colonialism in the Japanese empire as an act of untangling the threads that made, and continue to make up, the many Japanese empires. The most exciting comparative work is that which does not explicitly define itself as comparative at all, yet which forces the field to re-evaluate the possibilities and limits of producing knowledge through comparison.

  PublisherDOI

• Pandemics, politics and principles: business and human rights in Southeast Asia in a time of crisis.

  Melbourne Asia Review · 2020-08-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Business activity has been a key driver of economic dynamism in Southeast Asia and one of the main reasons for the region's growing prosperity in recent decades. It has led to increases in investment and consumption, boosted exports and, in so doing, promoted economic growth. This has in turn created jobs, improved incomes, increased governments' ability to provide social welfare, and lifted millions out of poverty.

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• Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development and the Cold War Order ed. by Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, and John DiMoia

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development and the Cold War Order ed. by Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, and John DiMoia Kate Mcdonald (bio) Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development and the Cold War Order. Edited by Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, and John DiMoia. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018. xiv, 252 pages. $122.00, cloth; $39.95, paper; $100.89, E-book. As I was preparing this review for publication, I received the news that Aaron S. Moore passed away unexpectedly. He made me a better scholar of Japanese history and the history of technology. He made the fields of modern Japanese history and the history of technology more ambitious, more exciting, and more humane. Thank you, Aaron. I will miss you. Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development and the Cold War Order is one of the most important edited volumes to come out in recent memory. The volume argues that the ideology of developmentalism enabled the rise of postcolonial nation-states in cold war Asia at the same time that it facilitated the re-establishment of prewar and wartime hierarchies. The chapters analyze a wide range of topics, including the history and politics of Japanese overseas development aid and large-scale infrastructure projects, networks of scientific knowledge production in East and Southeast Asia, and the transnational history of agricultural science in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Overall, the volume shows that a binational, U.S.-centric approach does little justice to the history of empire, science, and technology in cold war Asia. Instead, the volume shows how developmentalism served as the common ground for a multilateral politics of state formation and economic power in cold war Asia. Engineering Asia contributes to multiple fields. The most explicit contribution is to the field of postwar East Asian history, with an emphasis on postwar Japanese history. The volume is part of a recent turn in Japanese history that examines connections between East and Southeast Asian history, especially in Japanese-language scholarship. What may be unique about Engineering Asia is that it analyzes the formation and reformation [End Page 192] of the relationship between Japan, East Asia, and Southeast Asia across the wartime and postwar periods, replacing the standard teleology of "end of empire" with "transformation of empire." Focusing on "trans-war networks of technology," chapters by Hiromi Mizuno, Aaron S. Moore, Jin Sato, and Masato Karashima show how Japanese scientists, politicians, and intellectuals used their colonial experiences to rebuild political and economic relationships with Southeast Asia in the postwar era. Particularly significant in this regard is the role that Japanese scientific and technical knowledge played in the building of postcolonial states in Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand through large-scale infrastructure development projects and other forms of aid that began in the 1950s (rather than the 1970s, as the story has traditionally been told). In one of the volume's most interesting chapters, Eric G. Dinmore analyzes how the cold war shaped the rebirth of the Indonesian petroleum industry in the 1950s and 1960s. As Dinmore demonstrates, Japanese and Indonesian policymakers' "production sharing" approach to petroleum extraction created new tensions within the U.S. cold war bloc and contributed, ultimately, to the overthrow of the Sukarno government in 1965 and transformation of Japan into a major source of funding for the subsequent Suharto government. In an East Asian frame, the volume shows how science and technology promoted economic nationalism in formerly colonized regions of Asia, such as Korea and Indonesia; and how economic nationalism and cold war ideology institutionalized new circuits of knowledge transfer and research. Tatsushi Fujihara's and Tae-Ho Kim's chapters on rice breeding, for example, trace a transnational, transwar history of agricultural science that shows how the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines became a hub of agricultural scientific research in the 1950s and 1960s with significant outcomes for political and agricultural practices in Korea, Japan, the United States, and Taiwan. Manyong Moon situates the establishment of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology at the interstices of Korean nationalism and U.S.-Korea-Japan foreign relations during the Vietnam War era. John P. DiMoia highlights how experience with construction management during the Asia-Pacific and...

  PublisherDOI

• Placing Empire

  2020-02-14

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the role of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation and how, in turn, this sociospatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.

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Frequent coauthors

• Muhamad Ali

  4 shared

• Mark M. Hamilton

  4 shared

• Stephen W. Perkins

  Meridian Plastic Surgeons

  4 shared

• Hilde De Weerdt

  KU Leuven

  2 shared

• Michael Wert

  University of California, Irvine

  2 shared

• Paola Zamperini

  Northwestern University

  2 shared

• Kate Merkel‐Hess

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• Manan Asif

  University of Cincinnati

  2 shared

Labs

• Kate McDonald LabPI