Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor of History, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Written in the wake of the March 16 killing of eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta, the article examines how Asian immigrants and their descendants have navigated racial divides in Georgia. Suh’s research specializations include the US in the Pacific World, Asian American history, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, and the Progressive Era. His current book project is titled “At the Dawn of the Pacific Era: American Encounters with Asians in the Progressive Era of Empire and Exclusion.” Read an excerpt from the AJC piece citing Suh below along with the full article: “Asians have long, complex history navigating Georgia’s racial divides.”

“Chris Suh, an assistant professor of history at Emory, said the university was one of several southern Methodist schools that recruited elite students from East Asia in the 1880s and 1890s to train as missionaries in the southern conservative tradition.

“‘This is a time when Blacks and Jewish Americans are being persecuted, and you randomly have these Asian elites who are invited to dinner parties with the most influential southerners because they’re Christian, because they’ve conformed to what the white Christians believe is a great way for a non-white person to behave,’ said Suh.“