Dr Paris Pin-Yu Chen

• PhD in History, University College London
• MA in Baltic Sea Region Studies, University of Tartu
• MA in Nation, History & Society, University College London
• BA in Foreign Languages and Literature, National Taiwan University

I joined Birmingham in 2024 as a member of an international team investigating how successive land reforms have shaped subjectivities in modern Baltic states.

With a background in English and European literature, I moved from Taiwan to the UK and Estonia for a double-degree interdisciplinary MA with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. After Estonia, I returned to UCL and completed a PhD. 

I am a co-convenor of the Study Group on the Baltic States under the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES). 

My research interests include race, eugenics, minorities, and marginalised groups in modern Estonia and the wider Baltic-Nordic region. Currently I am working on an oral history project about the post-socialist land reform in Estonia.    

I have written about eugenics in interwar Estonia from the perspectives of transnational connections, regional belonging, radical nationalism, and racial anxiety. I am writing my first book on how the Estonian society experienced the rise of race science and eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century. 

My current project investigates subjective experiences of owning and losing land in Estonia in the 1990s. I am particularly interested in how the land reform’s impact has been felt and remembered in rural and borderland communities.