Aaron Molnar

Aaron Molnar is an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a historian of the material cultural, environmental, and global history of East Asia. His research interests focus on Goryeo Korea’s (918–1392) integration into the globalism of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368), the impact of climate variation on the premodern Korean Peninsula, and Chinese-Mongolian borderland relations. His first book project explores how Koreans and their material culture were an active component of the Mongols’ imperial project, examining human and material mobilities through materia medica, travelogues, poetry, and archaeological finds alongside dynastic records. The project highlights a broader and earlier Korean role in global integration than previously recognized.

As an Environmental Fellow, Aaron is working on his second interdisciplinary book project investigating how the Mongol and Ming Empires (1368–1644) cumulatively adapted to the Medieval Climate Anomaly–Little Ice Age climate transition 13^th–14^th centuries in their eastern Eurasian steppe borderlands. He investigates the development of historical climate change resilience by combining paleoclimatological and archaeological data with textual research. His other climate research, published in the Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, examines the confluence of climate variation, Mongol imperialism, and environmental change on the Korean Peninsula during the Goryeo period. Another article forthcoming in Monumenta Serica investigates the role of Mongols in the Ming Empire’s imperial enterprise and the construction of their identity by the imperial state.