Hoston is a specialist on both Chinese and Japanese politics, and her work has focused on the linkage between political development and political thought across national contexts. Her analysis of the debate on Japanese capitalism and reinterpretation on Japan's path to war in the 1930s (in Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan ) originated as part of a larger study on The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan (1994) which explores how the tensions between the assertion of national identity and the quest for a stateless communist society that transcended national boundaries and allegiances were resolved in radical discourses in the first non-European societies to which the Soviet Union sought to export Marxist-Leninist revolution. She is currently engaged in a study of the link between the development of civil societies and democratization in China and Japan, while completing a study of Faith, Will, and Revolutionary Change, which explores the persistence of the theme of the need for spiritual/cultural revolution in Chinese and Japanese thinkers and in their analogues in Latin American and Black African theologies of liberation. Graduate students working with her are not limited to those who specialize in East Asia, but include those studying popular movements and political thought in a variety of contexts, including Latin America.

Contact Information
Office: SSB 376
Phone: (858) 534-7376
E-mail: ghoston@ucsd.edu