Judd Kinzley is a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research treats borderlands, materiality and natural resources.  He is currently working on the transnational exchange of Chinese raw materials for cash, weapons and industrial goods during World War II. This work reveals the transnational networks that developed to finance, produce and transport such resources. These trans-Pacific networks channelled objects in both directions during the war and served as the blueprint of a new postwar international order.

Judd works in both Chinese and English, with experience researching in several archives in China, Taiwan, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Judd’s project at gd:c focuses on the legacies of Allied wartime oil exports to China, and how brought China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the United States and the European imperial powers together. Support of China’s war effort through deliveries of petroleum products relied on the transformation of global petroleum infrastructures that had long connected petroleum-producing regions to imperial metropoles, mostly in Western Europe. Oil transports from Burma and Iran into China during the war served as a detour, an “interruption” that bound the Middle East to the United States and East Asia, reshaping global energy flows.