My doctoral thesis “Entangled Asia: Korean Students and Japanese Protestantism, 1900 -1920” analyzes how the interaction between Japanese Protestants and Korean exchange students during the Meiji and Taishō eras contributed to the emergence of an ‘Asian identity’ among Japanese Protestants. Drawing on recent scholarship in Global History, I focus on the networks of Protestant Korean students and Japanese teachers that emerged within the context of church communities, the YMCA and the indigenous Japanese Christian non-church movement. So far, historians have widely ignored the complex and conflicting dynamics between Japanese Protestantism and Japan’s imperial project. Moreover, previous research tended to subordinate Korean colonial history to the main narratives of Japanese imperial history leaving little room for the agency of the colonized. Therefore, I aim at overcoming the national history paradigm and the top-down approach to imperial history. Furthermore, I challenge the assumption that the emergence of Protestantism in East Asia was a mere byproduct of Western-style modernization. Instead, my project is centered on Korean and Japanese actors in order to adopt a multi-layered perspective on Japan’s regional entanglements that goes beyond Euro-centric models of modernization.