Sakura Christmas

Sakura Christmas is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She focuses on Japanese imperialism in the Chinese borderlands through the lens of space, science, and the environment. Her dissertation examines how the Japanese occupation combined social scientific theories with new quantitative methods to chart nomadic decline as a crisis in eastern Inner Mongolia. There, planners and researchers reconstituted the relationship between nomads, settlers, and the land through theories of Marxist materialism, Social Darwinism, and cooperative evolution. Aerial technology, archeological excavation, and economic surveys all figured as significant tools in marking out ethnic and ecological divides in an attempt to bring spatial clarity to the borderlands with an unprecedented degree of precision. Sakura holds an AB from Harvard College, and has traveled, studied, and taught in both China and Japan.