Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She specializes in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Taomo received her B.A. from Peking University and Waseda University, M. Sc. with Distinction from the London School of Economics and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Journal of Asian Studies, Diplomatic History, The China Quarterly, The Critical Asian Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and the journal Indonesia.

Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. This book project has received funding from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and media attention from The New York Review of Books, The South China Morning Post and The Jakarta Post. A Bahasa Indonesia translation was published by Kompas Gramedia.

Taomo is currently working on her second book project tentatively entitled “Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone,” which is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. This research is funded by two Tier 1 grants from the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

Taomo is an elected representative of the Southeast Asian Council, the Association for Asian Studies. She also serves on the international advisory board of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and works as a review editor for H-Diplo, a flagship global interdisciplinary publication centered on diplomatic history.