About

Dr Kuan-Jen ‘KJ’ Chen (陳冠任 / チン・カンニン / 진관임) is a historian specialising in Cold War history, modern East Asian history, maritime history, and US foreign policy. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and is currently an Assistant Research Fellow (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His research has appeared in Cold War History, The Journal of Military History, The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Cold War International History Studies (冷戰國際史研究), Bulletin of Academia Historica (國史館館刊), and Being Nearby: Discussions on Modern China (近きに在りて). He has also been invited to give lectures and talks in China, France, Japan, Taiwan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chen received his BA and MA in History from National Chengchi University. He subsequently completed his compulsory military service from 2011 to 2012, serving as a corporal in the Military Police at the Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology. Following his military service, he taught history at junior high schools in 2013 before beginning his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge in 2014. In 2016, he was selected as a Japan Foundation Fellow and conducted archival research for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Tokyo. After receiving his PhD in 2019, Chen joined the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he conducted postdoctoral research and taught Cold War history and modern East Asian and Chinese history at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In 2021, he moved to Denmark to take up a Research Fellowship in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.

Chen is the author of Charting America’s Cold War Waters in East Asia: Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security (Cambridge University Press, 2024), winner of the 41st Masayoshi Ōhira Memorial Prize and the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) John Lyman Book Award in World Naval History, and a finalist for the 2025 CPH Book Prize. The book challenges conventional narratives of Cold War East Asia that have disproportionately emphasised land as a structural imperative in grand strategic thinking. Instead, Chen demonstrates how questions of sovereignty, local interests, and US international security concerns shaped the contested maritime arena of East Asia, whilst revealing the Janus-faced nature of American hegemony in the region during the Cold War.

Chen is currently working on his second book, G.I. Joe in Cold War Taiwan: A Transnational History, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press for its Military, War, and Society in Modern American History series. The book offers a comprehensive examination of the largely overlooked role of American military personnel in shaping Cold War Taiwan, placing the presence and everyday experiences of US servicemen within the broader transnational history of US–Taiwan relations.