Kate McDonald, associate professor in the Department of History, has been appointed Director of the East Asia Center at UCSB for a three year term. Dr. McDonald is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (California, 2017) and co-director of the NEH-funded digital spatial history project, Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History. In addition to her work with EAC, Dr. McDonald currently serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the field’s flagship journal, Journal of Asian Studies.