Yehji Jeong is a historian of empire and colonial governance, with particular interests in examining the concealed structures of power and governance within global empires. Focusing on the Japanese empire, she approaches early twentieth-century Manchuria as a critical site for understanding transimperial transitions and the formation of the subsequent Cold War order. Her book project, Bandits!: Sovereignty, Governmentality, and Racial Politics in Imperial Japan’s Manchuria, 1904–1945, examines how the Japanese empire expanded its colonial rule in Manchuria without establishing an official colony. Using the concept of “bandit” as a lens, the project explores the imperialist grammar shared across modern empires—race, sovereignty, governmentality, and spatial politics.

She recently published an article, “Making Manchuria Japan’s Frontier: The Bazoku Fantasy and Imperial Masculinity, 1900s–1920s” in Modern Asian Studies 59, no. 6 (2025): 1487–1507. This article analyzes how frontier fantasy of Manchuria as a land of bandits (bazoku, horse-riding bandits) in Japanese popular media reframed Manchuria as Japan’s frontier and shaped a pan-Asian model of imperial masculinity, from the 1900s to the 1920s.

In teaching, rather than reproducing insular knowledge of East Asia, she seeks to present Japan and East Asia as dynamic parts of global transformations. At The Ohio State University, she offers courses on modern Japan and East Asia, particularly locating Japan and its empire as a methodology for rethinking centrality from peripheral histories, examining the Japanese empire as a global empire spanning Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, Hokkaido, Manchuria, and the Pacific Islands, and exploring global migration.

Prior to joining the Department of History at The Ohio State University, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Williams College.