Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is a historian of modern Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and of political refugees, war trauma, and memory studies. His research examines the great exodus of 1949—millions who left China for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and beyond when the Chinese Communists seized power. Different from the established narratives of the Chinese revolution and the decades-old debate on “who lost China?” or the geopolitics of the Cold War and the Taiwan Strait Crises, the project seeks to understand how ordinary war refugees come to terms with the profound loss of home and family, and how suppressed trauma of 1949 are remembered and articulated in recent decades outside of China, especially in Taiwan. Dominic’s monograph, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2021), won the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. For his research accomplishments, Dominic also received the University of Missouri Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Research and Creative Activity Award, the first one to obtain such honor in the History Department.

In the past, Dominic has received other notable distinctions, including MA, PhD, and postdoctoral fellowships and awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Alice H. Sorila Memorial Scholarship in History, the Pacific Century Graduate Scholarship sponsored by the Government of British Columbia, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange’s doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, as well as the Chiang Ching-kuo Scholar’s Grant. Dominic was also a recipient of multiple Taiwan Fellowships and the Doctoral Fellowship Award for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Taipei’s Academia Sinica. In 2013-14, Dominic was a resident fellow for the theme of “Trauma and Social Transformation” at the Institute for Historical Studies, the University of Texas at Austin. He was a Washington DC Wilson Center Taiwan Fellow in the summer of 2021.

Currently, Dominic is conducting research on three new book projects, Chinese Civil War Trauma: White Terror Suppression in Chiang Kai-shek’s Army, Cambridge Concise Histories Series: A Concise History of Taiwan, and Islands of Statues: Memory Sites and Politics in Post-World War II East Asia. He is also working on number of article-length projects concerning Cold War refugees as well as memory politics and transitional justice in democratized Taiwan. During his time off, Dominic enjoys traveling with his partner Sydney Yueh. He also likes hiking, golfing, running, and other outdoor activities.