Jeffrey Ngo
Jeffrey C. H. Ngo specializes in the Pacific World.
He has broad research and teaching interests that span Chinese maritime and territorial frontiers, the Qing Empire, colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, as well as U.S. foreign affairs. Having concentrated his earlier academic work on cultural history, he has since moved on to explore questions of sovereignty, law, borderlands, and immigration. His dissertation project, entitled "Thuyền Nhân: Vietnamese Refugees, the Human-Rights Regime, and Global Governance in Hong Kong," is a new international history of the boat people — and the three Indochina Wars more generally — situated within the longue durée of Vietnam-Hong Kong connections. He holds a B.A. (2016) and an M.A. (2017) from New York University, where he edited the country's oldest undergraduate periodical in the field, The Historian. In 2017–18, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto's Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library. He has presented at flagship conferences convened by the American Historical Association and the Association for Asian Studies in addition to having spoken at various U.S., Canadian, British, and Hong Kong institutions.
At Georgetown, he offers China II: From Empire to Nation(s) and The Makings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos on the Hilltop campus and Sino-American Relations Since 1776 on the Capitol campus. The variety of other courses for which he previously served as a T.A. are The Pacific World; Central Eurasia: Steppe Empires and Silk Roads; China I: Origins and Imperium; The French Empire Since 1600; U.S. in the 1960s; and HyperHistory. He's the recipient of several accolades from the university, such as the Royden B. Davis Teaching Fellowship, a five-year Departmental Ph.D. Fellowship, a two-year Language Scholarship to learn Vietnamese at Johns Hopkins's School of Advanced International Studies, a Summer Dissertation Writing Award, the Piepho Travel and Research Grant, the Institute for Global History's Summer Grant, and four Conference Travel Grants. His latest academic publication, "Solace and Solidarity in Exile," is a long-form review essay that weaves a New Qing History of imperial peripheries into contemporary Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong experiences of displacement. It opens the China and Inner Asia section in the November 2024 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies.
He first lived in Washington for one extraordinary college semester in the fall of 2014 — when he interned at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History — before returning four years later as a Hoya to study under Professor James A. Millward. He now spends substantial time in London for research and writing. But no matter how far he goes, his heart is with the place he'll forever call home: Hong Kong.