Meet the L&A Team

Jean McElwee Cannon

Curator for North American Collections / Research Fellow

Jean M. Cannon is a research fellow and curator for North American Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, where she specializes in acquisitions, education, exhibitions, and scholarly publications. She received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, with a focus on WWI poetry and fiction, and holds a BA in English from Duke University. Prior to her current position, she was the Literary Collections Research Associate at the Harry Ransom Center, where she co-curated the 2014 exhibition The World at War, 1914-1918. She was also the curator of Hoover’s 2017 exhibition, Weapon on the Wall: American Political Posters of WWI. Cannon has also worked extensively in book publishing and advertising and as a freelance writer and editor.

Katharina Friedla

Taube Family Curator for European Collections / Research Fellow

Katharina Friedla is a research fellow and the Taube Family Curator for European Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University. She has studied History, East European and Jewish Studies at the Free University in Berlin, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and received her Ph.D. from the Department of History, Institute of Eastern European and Jewish History, University of Basel, Switzerland. Before her appointment at Hoover Library and Archives, she has been working as researcher, lecturer, translator, and scientific advisor for institutions and universities in Germany, Poland, and Israel. Dr. Friedla has published several books and dozens of articles on nationalism, identity politics, state ideology and forced migration in twentieth-century Europe. Most recently, she edited the book Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival.

Haidar Hadi

Curator for Middle East & North Africa Collections

Haedar (Haidar) Hadi is the Curator of the Middle East and North Africa Collections and Digital Systems Manager for the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. He is responsible for the development, implementation, and security of a sustainable IT environment that ensures that digital assets are methodically preserved and perpetually accessible to a broad research community. Hadi holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Information Systems with a sub-concentration in Data Analytics and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Hadi has completed several certifications in Project management, IT development, Cybersecurity, and Leadership programs.    

Before joining his current job, Hadi worked with the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF). Founded in 2003, the Iraq Memory Foundation is a non-profit organization working in Iraq and the US on documenting and analyzing the suffering of the Iraqi people under the Ba'thist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. His experience for both the Library & Archives collecting mission and technical work in cultural heritage are highlighted in the Hoover Digest article, "Mission to Baghdad."    

Hadi's work is to fulfill a vision of peace, coexistence, and genuine respect for incredible diversity within our world. He helped to establish two non-profit organizations in Iraq, one that provided financial aid to students in need and another focused on humanitarian dialogue and promoting cross-cultural coexistence. He also worked in the journalism and media sectors.

Herbert S. Klein

Curator, Latin America Collection / Research Fellow

Herbert S. Klein is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and curator of the Latin America collection in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. He had been a professor of history and the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University.

Klein received his BA in 1957 and his PhD in 1963, both from the University of Chicago. Before his appointment at Stanford, he taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University and is the Gouverneur Morris Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University.

He is the author or coauthor (in several languages) of more than thirty books and 195 articles on Latin America and on comparative themes in social and economic history. The Brazilian Academy of Letters awarded its 2010 Literary Prize for History and Social Science to him for Escravismo em São Paulo e Minas Gerais (coauthored) (2010). He received the Alfonso Reyes Prize, of the Colegio de México in 2019, and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Santiago, Chile also in 2019.  He has spent the last several years writing on Brazilian history, with his co-author Francisco Vidal Luna of the Universidade de São Paulo.  Among their books are Brazil Since 1980 (2006);  Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (2003), Slavery in Brazil ((2011); The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (2014) Brazil, 1964-1985, The Military Regimes of Latin America in the Cold War (2017); An Economic and Demographic  History of São Paulo 1850-1950 (2018); Feeding the World: Brazil’s Transformation into a Modern Agricultural Economy (2019); Modern Brazil: A Social History (2020); Social Change, Industrialization and the Service Economy in São Paulo, 1950-2020 (2022); Brazil: An Economic and Social History from Early Man to the twenty First Century (forthcoming 2024); and Brazilian Crops in the Global Market: The Emergence of Brazil as a World Agribusiness Exporter Since 1950 (forthcoming 2023)

Among his other books are four comparative studies of slavery, the most recent of which are African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (1986, 2nd revised edition, 2007), The Atlantic Slave Trade (1999, 2nd revised edition, 2010), Klein also wrote four books on Bolivian history, the latest of which is A Concise History of Bolivia (2003, 2nd edition revised 2011). He has also published The American Finances of the Spanish Empire, 1680–1809 (1998), A Population History of the United States (2004, 2nd revised edition, 2012), and Hispanics in the United States, 1980–2005 (coauthored) (2010).  Several of his books have appeared in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.

Hsiao-ting Lin

Curator, Modern China & Taiwan Collection / Research Fellow

Hsiao-ting Lin is a research fellow and curator of the Modern China and Taiwan collection at the Hoover Institution, for which he collects material on China and Taiwan, as well as China-related materials in other East Asian countries. He holds a BA in political science from National Taiwan University (1994) and an MA in international law and diplomacy from National Chengchi University in Taiwan (1997). He received his DPhil in oriental studies in 2003 from the University of Oxford, where he also held an appointment as tutorial fellow in modern Chinese history. In 2003–4, Lin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley. In 2004, he was awarded the Kiriyama Distinguished Fellowship by the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. In 2005–7, he was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he participated in Hoover’s Modern China Archives and Special Collections project. In April 2008, Lin was elected a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for his contributions to the studies of modern China’s history.

Lin’s academic interests include ethnopolitics and minority issues in greater China, border strategies and defenses in modern China, political institutions and the bureaucratic system of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), and US-Taiwan military and political relations during the Cold War. He has published extensively on modern Chinese and Taiwanese politics, history, and ethnic minorities, including Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Harvard University Press, 2016); Modern China’s Ethnic Frontiers: A Journey to the West (Routledge, 2011); Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–49 (UBC Press, 2006), nominated as the best study in the humanities at the 2007 International Convention of Asia Scholars; Taiwan, the United States, and the Hidden History of the Cold War in Asia: Divided Allies (Routledge, 2022); and over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes, reviews, opinion pieces, and translations. He is currently at work on two book projects which reevaluate the transformation of Taiwan’s politics and diplomacy from the 1950s to the 2000s, and investigate the history of Taiwan’s secret intelligence.

Anatol Shmelev

Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia / Research Fellow

Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia at Hoover’s Library & Archives, and the project archivist for its Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection.

Shmelev’s expertise is in twentieth-century Russian history, specializing in the Russian Civil War. As curator, he is principally responsible for acquiring archival materials relating to Russia, the Soviet Union, and the independent states that emerged from the USSR after 1991. 

Anatol Shmelev studied history at UCLA and UC Berkeley and received his PhD from the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, with a dissertation on the foreign policy of the Siberian government during the Russian Civil War. He has worked at the Hoover Institution since 1997. In addition to conducting his direct responsibilities, Shmelev has continued his scholarly engagement with Russian history, concentrating on information resources. His bibliography of Russian émigré military literature was published in 2007 by Norman Ross, following Tracking a Diaspora, a collection of essays on archiving the lives of Russian and East European immigrants published by the Haworth Press in 2006. Vneshniaia politika pravitelstva admirala Kolchaka, 1918–1919 (The foreign policy of Admiral Kolchak’s government, 1918–1919) was published by the European University Press in St. Petersburg in 2017. In the Wake of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917–1920, an expanded study of the foreign policy of the Anti-Bolshevik movement as a whole, was published by the Hoover Institution Press in 2021. In addition, Shmelev has written articles and reviews on various subjects connected with the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the postrevolutionary emigration. 

Kaoru Ueda

Curator of Japanese Diaspora Collections / Research Fellow

Kaoru (Kay) Ueda is a research fellow and the curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.  She holds a B.A. from Kwansei Gakuin University, an MBA from University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Boston University, and has unique experience both in business and academic worlds. Having worked as an analyst in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, and in the specialized library of the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History, Boston University, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Japanese diaspora and modern Japan and can unpack the complex interactive processes between Japan and host countries. Dr. Ueda has published in a number of international journals and shed light on overseas Dutch in early modern Indonesia and Japan. She also has extensive experience in organizing scholarly engagement and museum exhibitions.

At Hoover, her bilingual and inter-cultural capacities have helped create the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, the world’s largest open-access full-image digital collection of Japanese newspapers published overseas. She edited the volume Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan (Hoover Institution Press, 2021) and curated many of the materials used in the accompanying eponymous exhibition (2021-22) and online exhibition. Dr. Ueda manages the Japanese Diaspora Initiative, endowed by an anonymous gift to promote the study of overseas Japanese history during the Empire of Japan period. She is also the editor of On a Collision Course: The Dawn of Japanese Migration in the Nineteenth Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2020).