Keynote Speaker

Jomo Smith is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History where he has been teaching since August 2017. Prior to his time at Pitt, Jomo was a predoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has lived in Chinese speaking parts of East Asia for 5 years (non-continuous) and has also lived in Korea. Jomo first became interested in China during his undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are in borderland regions of China that are heavily populated by Tibetans and Chinese Hui Muslims. Questions of nationalism, identity and the role of minority populations in modern nation-states inform his work. As a historian, Jomo believes that the past can always shed light on current dilemmas and explain the inscrutable when research is thoroughly carried through.