The first lecture in the new "Talking About Asia" series will outline some of the controversies that exist when researchers, museum specialists, political figures, and eyewitnesses from the West and China talk about the World War II refugee community in Shanghai, China.

Steve Hochstadt has been Professor of History at Illinois College since 2006, after teaching at Bates College in Maine for 27 years. He was educated at Brown University: BA 1971, PhD 1983. His first book, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820-1989 (University of Michigan Press, 1999), won the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association. Sources of the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is a collection of documents widely used in Holocaust courses. Most recently, he published Death and Love in the Holocaust: The Story of Sonja and Kurt Messerschmidt, in collaboration with the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine. Hochstadt writes a weekly column for the Jacksonville (IL) Journal-Courier.

Hochstadt’s grandparents escaped from Vienna in 1939 and went to Shanghai. He has written two books about the flight of Jews to China. Excerpts from German interviews are used to tell that story in Shanghai-Geschichten: Die jüdische Flucht nach China, published in Berlin in 2007. Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich, based on a dozen interviews in English with former refugees, was published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan.