Victor Zatsepine

Associate Professor

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Ph.D., University of British Columbia

Area of Specialty

Chinese modern history, regionalism, and borders; Manchuria and the Russian Far East.

Current Research Interests

Sino-Russian frontier encounters, frontier societies in East Asia, Sino-Soviet exchange in the 1950s.

Biography

Victor Zatsepine grew up in Samara, Russia, where the Volga River crosses the Trans-Siberian Railway. From 1989 to 1993, he was an exchange student in Beijing, majoring in Modern Chinese, and later working as a researcher for major US media outlets. After finishing his MA at Harvard (1998) and PhD at the University of British Columbia (2006), he returned to Asia, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Peking University (2007), and a Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University (2008-2013). While majoring in modern Chinese history, he taught courses on China’s international history, on the Russian state and society, and on social dimensions of the 20th-century wars.

Selected Publications

Books

Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters Between China and Russia, 1850-1930. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.

Edited Volume

Laura Victoir and Victor Zatsepine, eds. From Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia: 1840-1940. Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2013.

Book Chapters

1. “Remembering the Blagoveshchensk Massacre,” in James Flath and Norman Smith eds. War and Remembrance in Modern China. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

2. “Three Nations in Search of Manchuria’s Past,” in Gerrit Gong and Victor Teo eds. Reconceptualising the Divide: Identity, Memory, and Nationalism in Sino-Japanese Relations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

3. “Russian Explorers, Religious Exiles and White Russians in Xinjiang,” in Peng De, Du Fachun eds. Western Development and Socio-Economic Change: China-CanadaComparative Studies. Beijing: Intellectual Property Rights Publishing House, 2010.

4. “Amur: As River, as Border,” in Diana Lary, ed., The Chinese State at the Borders. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.

Academic Journals

“An Uneasy Balancing Act: The Russian Émigré Community and Utopian Ideas of Manchukuo,” Journal of Northeast Asian History 10, no. 1 (Summer 2013).

“俄国对黑龙江边疆的殖民化,” 北大史学，北京大学历史学系编，2008年13期，215-233. [Russian colonization of the Heilongjiang/Amur Frontier, Historiography at the Peking University, History Department, Peking University, 13 (2008): 215-233.]

“华人对俄罗斯远东城市发展的贡献,” 西伯利亚研究，黑龙江省社会科学院，哈尔滨, 2007年第4期. [Historical contribution of Chinese migrants to urban development in the Russian Far East,” Siberian Studies, Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, Harbin, 4 (2007): 59-63.]