Headshot of Martin Fromm
Martin Fromm
Associate Professor
508-929-8613 mfromm@worcester.edu
Faculty Member's Office
Sullivan Bldg, Room S327A
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Bio

Martin Thomas Fromm is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Worcester State University. His research and teaching interests include regional and borderland histories, memory studies, truth and reconciliation, post-communist transition, minority histories, transnational Chinese migration, empire and nation, and the environment. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is author of Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which is also a monograph of the Columbia Weatherhead East Asian Series and Cambridge Studies in the History of the PRC. In this book he examines a Chinese state-sponsored oral history project in the 1980s that led to the publication of local, regional and national histories. These histories are the basis of his study of ideology formation and political mobilization, post-Cultural Revolution reconciliation, and the recovery of borderland identities in early post-Mao China.

Since the publication of Borderland Memories, Professor Fromm has expanded his research on the intersections of ethnicity, violence, memory, empire, and the environment in shaping the social and political ecologies of China’s northeast borderlands.  This research has resulted in the acceptance of articles for publication in the flagship Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and an edited volume titled Global Migration History under contract with Columbia University Press.

He is former Editor of Currents in Teaching and Learning (2015-2019), a peer-reviewed electronic journal that fosters exchanges among reflective teacher-scholars across the disciplines. He is also co-founder of the Shared Scholarship Series, a forum for faculty to share their research and creative endeavors with other faculty and staff, and founder of the East Asian History Speaker Series that features prominent scholars to generate more intellectual engagement and awareness on campus on issues relating to East Asian society and culture.

The courses that he teaches at Worcester State University range from introductory surveys on Chinese, East Asian, and world histories to upper-level seminars on that explore modern China and East Asia through the lenses of the environment, ethnicity, borderlands, imperialism, memory, and travel literature.. Upper-level seminars include Imperial Crossroads of East Asia (focusing on cultural and ethnic encounters in the Manchurian borderlands), Travels in Asia (examining East Asian history through travel narratives), Environmental Crisis and Management in China, Ethnic Identities in East Asia, and an all-Honors seminar titled History and Memory in East Asia.  He also teaches an Honors First Year Seminar entitled Made in China.