Overview
Kolleen Guy is Associate Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, where she has also served in senior academic leadership roles within the undergraduate program. She received her PhD in History from Indiana University, Bloomington, and previously held the Ricardo Romo Distinguished Professorship in the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Widely recognized for excellence and innovation in teaching, her scholarship bridges cultural history, memory studies, and the moral economies of food, labor, and care.
Her research is best known for its contributions to the history of food and wine, particularly her award-winning book, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of French Identity, 1820–1920, which examines how taste, place, and narrative helped shape modern French national identity. More broadly, her work explores how individuals and communities mobilize cultural practices, material culture, and storytelling to construct belonging under conditions of social and political pressure.
This conceptual framework now informs her research on European refugee and stateless communities during the Second World War. She is co-editor, with Jay Winter, of Statelessness after Arendt: European Refugees in China and the Pacific in the Second World War (2025), which rethinks statelessness beyond Europe through a transnational and comparative lens. She is also editor of A Cultural History of Wine in the Modern Age (forthcoming), part of Bloomsbury’s global cultural history series.
Her current research is supported by a UNESCO-funded collaborative grant that brings together scholarship, digital humanities, and public-facing heritage work to examine transnational memory networks, empathy, and survival practices among displaced populations in East Asia. Across her projects, Professor Guy’s work connects cultural history to urgent questions about identity, displacement, and moral responsibility in the modern world.