Brian P. Farrell (Principal Investigator)
Brian P. Farrell is Professor of Military History in the Department of History, National University of Singapore, where he has been teaching since 1993. His main research interests include the military history of the British Empire, the problems of imperial defence, and the Western military and geopolitical experience in Asia. He has published nine authored or edited books and more than a hundred journal articles, book chapters, and contributions to scholarly encyclopedias, dictionaries, companions, and handbooks. His most recent publication is the co-edited From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900-1954 (2022). He is the Principal Investigator of the project Friction and Order: Great Powers and Globalizing China 1854-1949, which generated this conference. 

Donna Brunero (Co-Principal Investigator)
Donna Brunero is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She teaches and researches on the British empire in Asia and maritime history, and the intersections between the two. This has led her to publish on a diverse range of topics including: Britain’s maritime empire in Empire in Asia: A New Global History (Vol. 2), co-edited with Brian P. Farrell (2018), and on family life for foreigners in the treaty ports in Life in Treaty Port China and Japan, co-edited with Stephanie Villalta-Puig (2018). She has also published on Britons in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, China coast views of the Meiji restoration, and maritime ethnography. In addition to being co-PI for the Friction and Order project, she is collaborating on a project which traces the complexities of trade and tariffs in 19th and 20th century East Asia.

Charles Burgess (Collaborator)
Charles Burgess is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore, where he also earned his PhD in 2020. A military historian, his research focuses on Western military power in Asia in the twentieth century, particularly the interactions between national policy, grand strategy, and the operational level of war. He is currently researching a book-length study on American and Nationalist Chinese airpower in China during WWII, while also converting his doctoral thesis on Allied grand strategy and anti-Japanese resistance forces in Southeast Asia into a monograph. He has also published articles in Diplomacy and Statecraft and the Journal of Military History. Prior to embarking on his PhD studies, Charles spent nearly 15 years working for the US government in various Asia-focused analytical and operational positions.

Jennifer Yip (Collaborator)
Jennifer Yip is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She studies modern war, strategy, and the socio-economic effects of war mobilization, with a focus on Republican China. Prior to joining the Department, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared in Modern China. Her first book manuscript, currently under contract with Cambridge University Press, focuses on the Chinese government's military grain provisioning policies during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). It highlights the seizure of grain as the lynchpin of the three-way struggle among the Nationalists, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the Japanese. 

Yamamoto Fumihito (Collaborator)
Yamamoto Fumihito is an author, historian, and book translator (English to Japanese). Born in Paris, brought up in Tokyo, and educated in Japan and Singapore, his research interests lie in the international history of the Twentieth Century, especially in Anglo-Japanese history. He received his PhD from the National University of Singapore, MA and BA from Dokkyo University, Saitama Japan. He published a research monograph in Japanese, Nichiei Kaisen Eno Michi: Igirisu No Shingapōru Senryaku To Nihon No Nanshin No Shinjitsu (The Road to the Anglo-Japanese War: Truths of the British Singapore Strategy and Japan’s Southbound Policies). He also co-edited three volumes of studies in Japanese, Kensho Taiheiyo Senso to so no Senryaku (Studies of the Pacific War and Its Strategies). His translation works included Kishore Mahbubani’s The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World, Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. He also co-translated Azar Gat’s War in Human History into Japanese.