Torsten Weber is a historian of modern East Asia and Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ Tokyo). He holds an M.A. in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London) and a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from Heidelberg University. His research focuses on the history of Japanese–Chinese relations and interactions from the modern to the contemporary era, including the politics of history and memory. He is particularly interested in the transnational and transimperial connections and rivalries between the Japanese and Chinese Empires and Western imperialism. His current project “Testifying and Contesting War Experiences–John Rabe’s Nanjing Diaries” (rabediaries.hypotheses.org) studies wartime diaries and other witness accounts of the Japanese invasion of China within a global framework of contested memories.

Select Publications:
- 2021: Finding China's 'Asia' in Japanese Asianism, in: Jonathan Henshaw, Craig A. Smith, Norman Smith (eds.): Translating the Occupation: The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931–45, Vancouver, pp. 209–222.
- 2021: Pan-Asianism, in: Immanuel Ness, Zak Cope (eds.): The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2nd ed., Houndsmill, pp. 2164–2174.
- 2018: Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912–1933, Cham.
- 2017: From Versailles to Shanghai: Pan-Asianist legacies of the Paris Peace Conference and the failure of Asianism from below. In: U. M. Zachmann (ed.): Asia after Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Post-War World, 1919–1933, Edinburgh, pp. 77–97.
- 2015: Same Race, Same Fate? Theories of Asian Commonality and the Shift of Regional Hegemony in East Asia after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894/5), in: Volker Barth, Roland Cvetkovski (eds.): Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters, London, pp. 153–170.