Micah Muscolino

How did you become interested in your field of expertise?
I started out as a history major at UC Berkeley and was going to study U.S. history. I took a very bad U.S. history class as a freshman, but I took a very good East Asian history class. That sort of pulled me in this direction. By the time that I was finished with my undergraduate career, I felt like there was a lot more about Chinese history in particular that I needed to learn. I’d also taken a few years of Chinese by then, and I definitely felt like there was more of the Chinese language that I wanted to learn. So, I decided to pursue my Ph.D. When I was doing my dissertation research, I was initially intending to do economic and social history, but I soon realized that I couldn’t really fully comprehend what I was looking at in that realm without also taking the environment seriously, so that’s what made me an environmental historian.

What’s the most interesting question or phenomenon you’ve come across in your research?
It is probably whether or how China can avoid all of the environmental pitfalls that have resulted from industrialization in other parts of the world, so whether it’s possible to have an alternative path towards industrial development that’s less damaging to the environment than the conventional one.

What is your take on cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan, and what’s the U.S.’s role in that?
Personally, I’m actually very sympathetic to the people who are involved on all sides, especially in the student movement [in Taiwan], and I think that the reality is closer ties between Taiwan and mainland China are inevitable. But I think it’s important for the forging of those ties to be beneficial to the people of Taiwan, not just Taiwanese business elites. And so that factor should be given far more attention than it has been over the past five years or so. That’s one of the reasons why [President of Taiwan] Ma Ying-Jeou has been so criticized because he decided, “We’re going to do this — create better cross-strait ties,” but he kind of failed to think about how that was going to affect Taiwan domestically, and now it’s blown up in his face. But basically, I think that improving cross-strait ties is really essential for peace, stability and economic growth in East Asia as a whole, but it shouldn’t be done at the expense of the economic well-being of the people in Taiwan or the people in mainland China, for that matter.

What’s the greatest challenge you face in teaching?
The greatest challenge that I face in teaching is probably making things accessible to students and making them feel like they are really invested in the subject matter, so making it pertinent and meaningful for them in their own lives and for their own futures. Sometimes that’s hard to do when you’re teaching history classes.

What drew you to Georgetown?
I think that Georgetown’s history department is a stellar institution, in terms of the colleagues that make up the department, especially for East Asian history and environmental history — those are really two of the department’s strengths. So that combination made it a really attractive place for me. Also, the caliber of the students at Georgetown makes it a really wonderful place to be a teacher, so in terms of the colleagues and in terms of the students, it’s really been a good place to be a professor.

What is your impression of Georgetown students over the years that you have spent here?
I think the students are extremely motivated and engaged, and they also have, on the whole, a real positive attitude, certainly in comparison with students at other institutions. The students at Georgetown really care about things. They care about what’s going in the city, they care about what’s going in the world and if you can tap into that enthusiasm, then they’re really good students to teach.

What kind of students do you usually find in your classes?
For the environmental history classes, a lot of students are STIA majors, students who are interested in contemporary environmental concerns and who are maybe more interested in the contemporary situation than in the past. What I end up having to do is to convey to them the importance of understanding history simply as a way to appreciate the way things got to be the way they are. For the Chinese history classes, the students mostly are also interested in contemporary China, but again, they oftentimes don’t have a nuanced appreciation not just of how China came to be the way it is, but also the alternatives that existed in China’s past.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in academia?
I have no idea, but I would’ve liked to have been a cartoonist. That was my junior high school dream, but somehow I became a history professor instead.

Interview by Penny Hung