Zelin Pei

2024 Graduate Student Peer Mentors Award

Zelin's research explores the relationship between imperialism and environmental change in Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait during the late Qing period (1840-1895), the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), and the Nationalist authoritarian period (1945-1987). He seeks to understand how the Qing, Japanese, and Chinese Nationalist regimes, as well as competing Western empires, dealt with and were shaped by the terrestrial and oceanic environments of Taiwan as they pursued their respective commercial, colonial, and developmentalist goals.

A remarkably engaged peer mentoring group, the History Graduate Association (HGA) plays a critically important role in the success not just for our graduate students but for undergraduates and for other graduate students across campus. They are a model of a peer mentoring community. Both through its individual peer mentor program for new students and through its work as a peer mentor community, the HGA serves as a raft that buoys fellow students through the ebbs and flows of graduate school.