Andrew Noland

I am a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota Political Science Department. Nestled somewhere between Global and Comparative Politics, I study the politics of memory and heritage in the Anthropocene. I focus on how domestic political contestation over the past in and across the Pacific affects international institutions and transnational actors' efforts to craft a singular world heritage regime. I also trace how these contests affect life in a Pacific Rim threatened by fossil capitalism and rising geopolitical tensions.

I am currently working on three research projects. The first asks and answers how and why states invoke genocide in their building of monuments and memorials in other states. I illustrate how South Korea, Israel, and the People's Republic of China develop national museums that commemorate terrible atrocities during the Second World War. I then explore how their victimhood narrative strategies have created the clashing temporalities of Never Again and Now: how do we internalize the commandment "Never Again" when the advantages granted to politicians and policymakers who wield the past for "Now" to win elections and stir nationalism for regime support appear too tempting?

The second project examines how French cultural hegemony in 17th and 18th century Europe challenges our understanding of 1) the Westphalian international system and 2) the origins of international cultural orders. While Louis XIV's military endeavors and material advantage over the European continent generated both bandwagoning and balancing coalitions that we might expect from traditional security scholarship, his reign also imposed an international cultural order that would persist until the 20th century. French became the language of courts and diplomacy (lingua franca), rival states such as Prussia and the United Kingdom copied French models of salons and scientific societies, and French philosophes earned their place among the pinnacle of "Enlightenment" thinkers. How and why could absolutist France simultaneously assert cultural hegemony and wage war against Europe?

The third research project is a co-authored inquiry into the relationship between the World War II "comfort women" system and Asian/American activism. Noticing how Asian/American activists defy the nationalist lines that characterize the Memory Wars in East Asia, we argue that the comfort women system can be situated within an American imperial order that consistently silences the history and ongoing cases of racialized gendered violence.