Rate My Professor Kate McDonald

Kate McDonald is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego and serves as Director of the East Asia Center. Her research explores the social, cultural, and technological history of mobility in twentieth-century Japan and the Japanese Empire, with particular attention to critical geography, modern empire in Asia and the Pacific, and spatial history. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern and recent Japanese history, the history of empire, and critical global history, including HIST 187B: History of Modern Japan, HIST 187C: Recent Japan, and HIST 221A/B: Graduate Research Seminar in Transnational Empire.

McDonald has published the monograph Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) and has under contract The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine (Cambridge University Press). Her peer-reviewed articles include “What Makes Transportation History: The Rickshaw Past and the Contested Meaning of a Modern Concept” in The American Historical Review (2025), “Olympic Recoveries” in the Journal of Asian Studies (2020), “War, Firsthand, at a Distance: Battlefield Tourism and Conflicts of Memory in the Multiethnic Japanese Empire” in Japan Review (2019), and “Asymmetrical Integration: Lessons from a Railway Empire” in Technology and Culture (2015). She co-developed digital platforms Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History (2021) and 1.0 (2019) with David R. Ambaras. Professionally, she serves as Associate Editor for Japan at the Journal of Asian Studies and co-editor of the Johns Hopkins University Press series Studies in the History of Technology. Her awards include the NEH Dangers and Opportunities of Technology Grant (2024), F. Hilary Conroy Prize (2023), Gerda Henkel Research Scholarship (2021-2022), NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Level II (2019), UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2015-2016), Hellman Fellowship (2013-2014), Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship (2013-2014), and Fulbright Fellowship (2008-2009). Through her scholarship, editorial roles, and digital innovations, McDonald advances spatial humanities and mobility studies in East Asian history.