Dr. Ke-Chin Hsia

Professional Background

Ke-Chin Hsia is an associate professor of modern European history at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in history from National Taiwan University. Dr. Hsia’s primary research fields are the late Habsburg Empire and Central Europe after 1918, specifically about the themes of social welfare, social history of war, citizenship, nationalism, disability, bureaucracy, and displacement. His research has been supported by the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalisation, the National Science Council of Taiwan, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, and the Central European History Society, among other prestigious organizations.

Dr. Hsia’s open-access book, Victims’ State: War and Welfare in Austria, 1868-1925, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He has also published several book chapters on war victim welfare in World War I and post-1918 Austria, on Austrian Studies in the Chinese-speaking world, and the unexpected celebrity of the Habsburg empress-queen Elisabeth (Sisi/Sissi) in post-Mao China (with Dr. Fei-Hsien Wang). 

Fellowship Research

Ke-Chin Hsia was awarded the Sosland Foundation Fellowship for his research project, “‘Who is an Austrian?’: Refugees in Post-Wold War II China and Austria.” Dr. Hsia’s research aims to approach the dual historical question—who is an Austrian/what makes an Austrian “Austrian”—by focusing on Central European refugees who identified themselves or were ascribed by others as “Austrian” after World War II. This research will also analyze experiences when refugee welfare and personal safety hinged squarely on their claimed identities being accepted.

This fellowship allows Dr. Hsia access to the Museum’s rich collections to study how the displaced “Austrians” in China—primarily the ca. 4,000 “Austrian” Jews—tried to prove or define who they were at the intersection of, on the one hand, the long-standing Austrian/European bureaucratic-legal culture, and on the other the new international order in which power relations between Europe and China, and between Europe and US-led international organizations, ostensibly reversed. Central themes for this research project include how post-World War II national officials (Chinese, Austrian, and the US, for example) and international relief agencies (both Jewish and United Nations organizations) categorized the refugees and decided their future and how the refugees asserted their preferences and identities or even “gamed the system.” The work also emphasizes daily interactions among the refugees, officials, and myriad agencies and the seemingly mundane acts and objects they generated.

Residency Period: January 1, 2025–April 30, 2025