Tomer Nisimov is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the America in the World Consortium at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University, where he studied under Stephen Kotkin. His research examines the political, military, and ethnopolitical history of twentieth-century Eurasia, with a particular focus on Northeast Asia, the Second World War, China’s Civil War, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Sino-Soviet split. His work explores the intersection of geopolitics, nationalism, borderlands, security, and foreign relations through transnational and comparative perspectives.

Before joining the Clements Center, Tomer lived, studied, and conducted research for several years across Asia, chiefly in mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. He is fluent in Chinese, proficient in Russian, Korean, and Mongolian, and has reading knowledge of Japanese, and his research draws on archival materials and other sources in all these languages.

Tomer is currently revising his PhD dissertation “Civil War and Agency of Small States: Mongolia, North Korea, and the Making of China’s Autonomous Regions, 1945-1959” into a book manuscript. The project examines how Outer Mongolia and North Korea shaped the emergence of China’s ethnic minority autonomous regions during the Civil War of the late 1940s. Utilizing Chinese intelligence sources, Cultural Revolution materials, archival documents of foreign affairs ministries, alongside many other sources, it argues for placing the history of the People’s Republic of China’s ethnopolitics within a transnational framework that highlights the agency of smaller states in shaping the policies of a major power.

His broader research interests include modern China, Korea, Mongolia, as well as Soviet history. Tomer is currently pursuing a collaborative project on the adaptation of Soviet political, military, social, cultural, and economic models in the early People’s Republic of China. He is also working on historical projects on the Guomindang’s intelligence agencies and spymasters, drawing on his decade-long experience in analyzing archival intelligence documents and reports in order to reassess these agencies’ organization, methods, and capabilities.