Cruz (Wenhao) Guan is a Ph.D. candidate in modern East Asian/Chinese history in the Department of History. His dissertation examines China’s transformation from an empire into a modern nation-state between 1800 and 1937, with particular attention to cartography, modern education, print culture, and Shanghai’s publishing industry. Adopting a multi-layered perspective and drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from geography, his work argues that the cartographic construction of a new Chinese nation-state emerged through complex interactions among the different—and sometimes contradictory—spatial understandings of the imperial court, state officials, nonofficial elites, and ordinary people.

Cruz has published work for both academic and general audiences. His forthcoming article, “Educating Teachers before Students: National Humiliation, Nation-Building, and Geography Teachers’ Guides in Modern China, 1910s–1937,” is forthcoming in Twentieth-Century China. He also contributed an entry on the 2009 China Central Television adaptation of the traditional Chinese drama The Return of the Soul at the Peony Pavilion to The Chinese Theater Collaborative/華語戲聚. In October 2024, he published an article on the establishment of the People's Republic of China in Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.

Since 2021, Cruz has conducted archival research in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. His project has received support from several OSU internal research and travel grants, including the Office of International Affairs’ International Research and Scholarship Grant and Phyllis Krumm Memorial International Scholarship; the Department of History’s Retrieving the American Past Award and Tien-yi Li Prize; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies’ Graduate Research Grant. He has also received external funding through the Association for Asian Studies’ East and Inner Asia Council Small Grants program. For the 2025–26 academic year, he was awarded the Department of History’s Richard R. Duncan Fellowship, a competitive nine-month fellowship providing full tuition, fees, and stipend support for dissertation writing.

At Ohio State, Cruz has served as a graduate teaching associate for ten different courses in the Department of History and as the instructor of record for three undergraduate courses: History 2401, History of East Asia in the Pre-Modern Era (to 1800) (Spring 2024 and Spring 2025); History 2402, History of East Asia in the Modern Era, 1600 to the 1990s (Autumn 2024); and History 2642, Global History, 1500 to the Present (Autumn 2026). Beyond teaching, he served as a member of the Department of History’s successful search committee for a historian of modern Japan. He also served on the department’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee during the 2023–24 academic year and represented GSAC on the Undergraduate Teaching Committee.