Kolleen M. Guy is a historian of transnational culture whose research examines how ideas, commodities, and displaced communities move across borders to create new forms of identity and belonging. Her scholarship spans global food history, wine studies, and the history of human rights and statelessness. She is the co-editor of Statelessness after Arendt: European Refugees in China and the Pacific in the Second World War （2025）, which extends Hannah Arendt’s insights by illuminating the global dimensions of statelessness and the emotional and political strategies refugees forged in Asia and the Pacific. Her award-winning book When Champagne Became French established her early contributions to food and identity studies, and her current monograph,“The Taste of Landscape: Food and the Meaning of Place in Global Markets,” traces how terroir evolved from a French cultural idiom into a global framework shaping food regulation, authenticity, and environmental governance. Together with her other manuscript project,“The Parapolitics of Empathy,” these works reflect her commitment to understanding how cultural practices, moral concepts, and material landscapes shape memory, community, and global interconnection.

Guy’s teaching philosophy is grounded in the conviction that rigorous scholarship and transformative pedagogy are mutually reinforcing. She teaches widely in transnational history, including courses on refugees and statelessness, historical methods, global food systems, and the cultural representation of war. Her classes emphasize inquiry-driven learning, close engagement with archives and material culture, reflective writing, and experiential fieldwork in museums and memory sites. Drawing directly from her research, she guides students in examining how historical narratives are constructed, how communities respond to rupture, and how ethical and political ideas take shape across borders. Known for her mentorship and interdisciplinary teaching, she inspires students to become analytical thinkers and globally engaged scholars.

Guy received her Ph.D. in History from Indiana University Bloomington. She earned her M.A. in History from Northern Illinois University in 1989 and her B.A. in History and English from North Central College in 1985. Before joining Duke Kunshan University, she served for over two decades on the faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she held the Ricardo Romo Distinguished Professorship in the Honors College.