Headshot of Martin Fromm
Martin Fromm
Professor
Martin Fromm
508-929-8613 mfromm@worcester.edu
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Sullivan Bldg, Room S327E
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Bio

Martin Thomas Fromm is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in environmental history, borderland studies, ethnic relations, violence and genocide, studies on memory and knowledge production, and post-communist transition.

His first book, Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambridge University Press, 2019), investigates the cultural and political processes by which the Chinese party-state navigated its post-communist transition during the 1980s.  In the book, Fromm argues that the northeast borderland’s complex history of colonialism, migration, transnational and transcultural encounters and hybridity, and the region’s historical role as experimental engine of East Asian modernities, created a fertile environment for the party-state to carry out a project of post-Cultural Revolution truth and reconciliation, ideological reinvention, and post-communist transition. In contrast with present-day hardening of restrictions on cultural expression, his research reveals that the early post-Mao state was compelled to collaborate with and accommodate diverse perspectives of local elites whose experiences of traversing imperial and national boundaries made them ambivalent but valuable resources for engineering political transition without regime change.

Since the publication of Borderland Memories, Fromm’s peer-reviewed work on “Great Northern Wilderness”-style environmentalism and post-colonial ideological ambivalence has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Modern Asian Studies.  His investigation of the history and legacies of border violence in Chinese, Russian, and Japanese imperial and national projects in northeast Asia will appear in the edited volume Global Migration History, currently under contract with Columbia University Press.

Fromm is the co-editor, with Loretta Kim (Hong Kong University) and June Hee Kwon (Sacramento State University) of a special issue on the “New Northern Frontier” that is under review with Modern Asian Studies, for which Fromm’s article investigates inter-ethnic reconciliation projects in China’s northeast borderlands during the 1980s.

Fromm’s current book project examines the environmental history of the northeast borderland since the 1950s. It aims to explore ethnic minority and indigenous perspectives on human-nature relations, cultural and literary imaginings of nature, transnational and regional dynamics of ecological conservation, and the environmental implications of border making, maintaining, and crossing.

Fromm has been nominated three times for the George I. Alden Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023, 2022, and 2017. He offers courses that train students in core historical methodologies and foundational concepts of Chinese and East Asian history, along with upper-level electives that draw students into critical engagement with the latest scholarly historical perspectives on topics including environmental history, borderlands, ethnic relations, imperial crossroads, and travel encounters.

Fromm is the organizer of the university’s East Asian History Speaker Series , co-founder of the Asian Studies Program and Shared Scholarship Series, former Editor of Currents in Teaching and Learning (2015-2019), and recipient of the Extraordinary Dedication Award (2018).

Trained at Brown University, Stanford University, and Columbia University, Fromm taught at University of North Florida, Bucknell University, Valparaiso University, and Wheaton College (in Massachusetts) before joining the History and Political Science Department in 2013.

Education
2010
Columbia University
Modern Chinese History
Ph.D.
2001
Stanford University
East Asian Studies
MA
1997
Brown University
East Asian Studies
BA

Publications

Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
“Invoking the Ghosts of Blagoveshchensk: Massacre, Memory, and the Post-Mao Search for Historical Identity.” Joseph Tse-hei Lee and Siu-Keung Cheung, eds. China's Rise to Power: Conceptions of State Governance. Palgrave-MacMillan, November 2012.
“Mining Manchuria’s Colonial Past: Ideological Ambivalence and Commemoration Work in China’s Northeast Borderland since the 1980s.” Journal of Asian Studies, 82:1 (Feb 2023): 66-95.
“‘Great Northern Wilderness’-Style Environmentalism: Nature Preservation and the Legacies of Mao-era Land Reclamation in China’s Northeast Borderland.” Modern Asian Studies, 57:4 (July 2023): 1198-1218.
-- “Staking claims to Manchuria: Russian, Japanese, and Chinese Reflections on the Blagoveshchensk Massacre since 1900.” Chapter in Andrew Liu, Owen Miller, and Meha Priyadarshini, eds. Global Migration History. Under contract with Columbia University Press.
-- Co-editor with Loretta Kim (Hong Kong University Press) and June Hee Kwon (Sacramento State University), special issue titled “The New Northern Frontier: Historical and Anthropological Paradigms of Bordered Identities,” under review with Modern Asian Studies.
-- “Redefining Ethnic Relations in Post-Mao China’s Northeast Borderlands” (article under review with Modern Asian Studies as part of proposed special issue).
Review of Franck Billé’s Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2020) in Environment, Space, Place 13, no. 1 (2021): 157-62.
Review of Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino- Russian Border. Agricultural History 96, nos. 1-2 (2022): 310-312.
Review of Andrew G. Walder’s Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China’s Southern Periphery (Stanford University Press) in Journal of Asian Studies (2024) 83 (1): 167–171.
Forthcoming. Review of Julian Gewirtz's Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s (Harvard University Press) in The American Historical Review.