Hannah Shepherd

Hannah Shepherd is Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Before joining the Yale faculty, she was Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She holds degrees from Harvard University (AM, PhD), SOAS (MA), and the University of Oxford (BA Hons).

Shepherd’s teaching and research interests focus on modern Japan and its colonial empire, with an emphasis on the connected twentieth-century histories of imperial expansion, urban growth, and movement of peoples between Japan and Korea. Her forthcoming book, The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region (December 2025, University of California Press) focuses on two cities on either side of an imperial border. This project is based on her Ph.D. dissertation, for which she was awarded the 2019 Harold K. Gross Dissertation Prize by the Harvard Department of History. Her broader interests include urban and spatial history, Pacific history, migrants and migrations, and the histories of women in Empire.

Shepherd has been a Research Fellow at Waseda University (Tokyo), Yonsei University (Seoul), and Kyushu University (Fukuoka). Her research has been supported by the Japan Foundation, Korea Foundation, and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.  At Yale, Shepherd teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern Japanese history, Korea and the Japanese Empire, and the history of colonial and imperial cities.

Selected Publications

• The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region (December 2025, University of California Press)
• Article: “Japan’s Local Imperialists: Expansive Ideas of Hometown and Empire within the Asia-Pacific World.” Modern Asian Studies, August 2025, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X25000150.
• Chapter, “An Urbanizing Ocean: Constructions of the Tsushima Strait, 1876–1945” In Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History edited by Stefan Huebner, Nadin Heé, Ian Jared Miller and William M. Tsutsui, 56-68. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824899271-008
• “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War”: The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct” Amy Stanley, Hannah Shepherd, Sayaka Chatani, David Ambaras and Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (March 2021)
• Article, “Fukuoka’s Meiji Migrants and the Making of an Imperial Region” Japan Forum (December 2018)
• Co-authored chapter with Itoh Kaori, “Gakusei seikatsu to Hakozaki” [Student life and Hakozaki], in Kyushu shigaku kenkyukai (ed.) Ajia no naka no Hakata wan to Hakozaki [Hakozaki and Hakata Bay in Asia]. Tokyo, Bensei shuppan, 2018.
• Article, “Writing home: settler women in Japan’s Empire” History Today (January 2018)