Eva Baudler

I am a History PhD student in the field of Modern Europe with a focus on overseas Chinese and their lives within Germany and among its colonial and totalitarian projects between the 1880s and 1945. These lives are located in temporary contract labor and the coolie trade, university education, and communist and nationalist dissidence. They were seen as displaced and dishonorable upon departure, and at the same time, leveraged as industrial assets for the Chinese state or expendable goods under the German empire and Nazi regime. Nonetheless, those among the Chinese diaspora bloomed where they were planted in their respective work, studies, and goals. Limited research has been dedicated to their memorialization after exploitation and persecution under both the Second and Third Reichs, a gap that I hope to address through my program. I offer a window into spatial recognition (or lack thereof) and the motivations of countries like Germany and China in promoting and disappearing memories.

Before my time at Stanford, I received a BA in English & History from Loyola Marymount University, where I cultivated an interest in public history, archival silences, and disability studies. My undergraduate thesis highlighted multiracial memoirs and personal family history centered on World War II, the Holocaust, and "historical amnesia" in postwar Germany. During my MA program, I launched projects about the censorship of Japanese textbooks, caregiving in the United States, and Chinese workers in Hamburg, Germany. Previously, I served as a literature and history teacher for 8th-12th graders and exchange students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.