Assistant Professor
BA, MA (York University); PhD (University of Bristol)
Thomas Larkin teaches courses on the history of the United States in a global context, with a strong focus on U.S. contact with China. Research interests include identity, gender, and race; global-microhistorical methods; and the application of digital tools to better understand social networking and histories of space/place. He has worked extensively on the history of nineteenth-century China's American community, oversees the Mapping Sino-Foreign Networks and Mobility (MSFN) and Mapping Historic Hong Kong (MHHK) digital projects, and is an honorary research associate of the University of Bristol's Hong Kong History Centre.
His publications include: The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society (Columbia University Press, 2024); a chapter in the recently released volume East Asia beyond the Archives: Missing Sources and Marginal Voices, ed. by Catherine S. Chan and Tsang Wing Ma (Leiden University Press, 2023); and articles in the Pacific Historical Review (2023), the Historical Journal (2023), Gender and History (2022), and Cultural and Social History (2020). He is currently expanding his digital projects and working on a book on American transimperialism in East Asia during the mid-to-late nineteenth century.