The Society for Military History

Stanford University, Department of History

Stanford Humanities Center, Career Launch Fellow (2022-2023)

Gordon Chang

U.S. foreign policy
Environmental history
Climate history
Commodity history
World War II
Vietnam War
Cold War

Climate Crucible: American Choices in Germany, Japan, & the Making of the Great Acceleration, 1939-1953

Paul is a PhD candidate Stanford in the Department of History researching questions of power, justice, and environmental change in the modern world from the local to the planetary scale. Paul’s dissertation and first book project examine how choices of U.S. foreign policymakers in the mid-twentieth century shaped long-term trajectories of anthropogenic climate change and the geopolitics of climate (in)justice. He explores this story through a comparative study of American decisions on industrialization and resource use in the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan. Some of Paul's other research traces connections among patterns of labor, land use, commodities, community, race, and gender in the twentieth-century United States and the wider Pacific world. Topics include the role of Asian American and Asian diasporic networks in early twentieth-century Californian floriculture, the role of women in the late twentieth-century U.S. wine industry, and American bioprospecting in early twentieth-century China. His teaching experience has engaged themes in modern American, Japanese, Southeast Asian, and transnational history as well as the ethics of war and climate justice.