Ahn Doohwan
안두환 / 安讀煥

Field of Study

Years of Stay at HYI

Aug 2017 to May 2018

University Affiliation

Ahn Doohwan is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Politics and International Relations at Seoul National University in Seoul, where he has been teaching international history since 2013. He obtained a PhD degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2012. His research interests are in early modern European intellectual history, with a special focus on the birth of the British Empire. Ahn has published widely on this subject and is currently completing his first book, tentatively entitled Britain before the Empire: Bolingbroke and the Road to the Patriot King, 1688-1751. His recent publications include “From Hanover to Gibraltar: Cato’s Letters (1720-1723) in International Context,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 8 (2016), and Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations (New York: Brill/Rodopi, 2014), co-edited with Christoph Schmitt-Maaß and Stefanie Stockhorst. As a HYI-Radcliffe Institute Joint Fellowship recipient, Ahn will work on a new book project provisionally entitled Imperial Crossroads: Great Britain and the United States in the Far East, 1853-1945. Surveying Anglo-American competition in the Far East at the turn of the nineteenth century, he intends to identify anew conditions for a peaceful power transition and possible risks in the process. While revisiting the East Asian entry into the international society by reframing it in the context of the Anglo-American contest for empire, Ahn also wants to draw historical lessons for contemporary US-China relations. Ahn is a founding editorial board member of the journal Global Intellectual History from the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews.

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