Zachary Smith

Associate Director, Center for Asian Language and Cultures and Associate Professor of History

zsmith@uca.edu

Irby 105G

(501) 450-3158

Dr. Zach Smith is a cultural historian of modern China and the Chinese diaspora in America, focusing on questions of citizenship and belonging among rural Chinese communities on both sides of the Pacific. He earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, and his research on popular literacy in Republican China has been published in Twentieth-Century China and The Edinburgh History of Reading. More recently, he has turned his attention toward local Asian American history, and in 2023 he partnered with the Chinese Association of Arkansas to found the Arkansas Chinese Heritage Project, a multidisciplinary online oral history archive showcasing the rich history of Chinese communities in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas.

At UCA, Zach serves as Associate Director of the Center for Asian Languages and Cultures and the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Asian Studies Minor Program. In the classroom, he seeks to make Asian history accessible through visual culture, community-based research, and experiential service-learning in classes such as Modern China, Gender and Sexuality in East Asia, Postwar Japan through Film, Asian American History in the South, and his First Year Seminar on the Global History of Student Protest. He also offers a wide variety of professional development workshops for Arkansas K-12 teachers through his role as Director of the Arkansas Partner Site for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia.

He is currently working with a team of community leaders, archivists, and undergraduate researchers to develop lesson plans, digital exhibits, and GIS StoryMaps chronicling Chinese-owned grocery stores in Arkansas, as well as drafting an article manuscript about Chinese merchant networks in the Jim Crow South. He is also working on getting more sleep and petting more cats.