Currently, Professor Pomfret is working on a RGC GRF project examining trans-colonial cultures of youth in Asia from the late 19th to the mid 20th century. European society in colonial places was often strikingly young. What implications did this have? The project examines the difference that age made to colonialism and imperialism in Europe's empires. Using a trans-colonial and comparative approach looking across empires it reveals how the cultures of youth flourishing in empire places in East and Southeast Asia affected the broad course of European history. The project shows how the youthfulness became a principal criterion for membership of foreign society 'Out East,' and powerfully informed the way 'Europeans' and others saw themselves; how the demographic youthfulness of foreign societies from Saigon to Shanghai posed a multitute of challenges to governments; and how it defined the cultures and institutions of colonialism in places such as Hong Kong, Hanoi, Saigon, and Singapore. This project contributes to an important new research agenda tracing the global genealogies of youth cultural practice and it reveals how youth mobility connected empire worlds.

"Pomfret's wide-ranging study is based upon artful readings of published and archival sources that span the globe and two centuries of colonial history... By elucidating how the hallmarks of empire were mapped onto children and their colonial childhoods, Pomfret elucidates the simultaneously varied and entangled nature of imperial interaction."

- M. Giblin, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, 2 (2017): 271-2.

Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century
[co-edited with Professor Richard Ivan Jobs]

"Mixing two innovative fields of research does not automatically ensure good scholarship. Yet in the case of Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, a collection of essays edited by Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, the result commands admiration... Jobs and Pomfret's collection adds important new pieces to the historiographical puzzle and greatly enhances our understanding of the reciprocities of the histories of modern youth and modern globalization."

- Mischa Honeck, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9:2 (2016), 356-8.

"The global reach of this excellent volume – from China to the Middle East, Japan to South America – is well served by well researched, well argued, and well written chapters on youth, transnationalism, mobility, and modernity. The volume has an excellent introduction and many compelling and original chapters. Some chapters are truly outstanding, many are very, very good... The volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates."

- Anne Gorsuch, University of British Columbia

"offer[s] substantial insight into how young people variously functioned as emblems and agents of modernity, reconstruction, national identity, mobility and hybridity."

- Briony Neilson, Modern and Contemporary France 25, 2 (2017): 236-7.

Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China: Community, Culture and Communication
[co-edited with Kam Louie and Julia Kuehn]

"True to its title, this book articulates and updates the notion of Chinese identity through representational studies of literature, art, dance, drama and film produced in diasporic Chinese communities in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and North America, against the backdrop of China rising as a political and economic superpower over the past three decades."

- Jennifer Jay, The China Journal 73 (2015): 300-1.

"This book of collected essays is an excellent starting point from which to explore the growing literature that examines the cultural production of the Chinese diaspora in a contemporary era that acknowledges China's changing political and economic landscape. The diverse range of cultural production that the authors collectively study presents an effective means of exploring such a landscape."

- S.K. Tan, Pacific Affairs 88, 2 (March 2015): 292-4.

Imperial Contagions: Medicine and Cultures of Planning in Asia, 1880-1949
[co-edited with Robert S. Peckham]

"This substantial collection greatly enriches our understanding of medicine, disease, and policy in colonial Asia. The contributors, from a range of disciplines, grapple fruitfully with questions surrounding medical space and the shift from enclavism to public health. In doing so, they make important theoretical and empirical contributions to medical and imperial history."

- David Arnold, author of Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India.

"Europeans in Asia developed powerful anxieties about contagion, and made many plans to keep it at a safe distance. Commercial ventures depended on mobility of people and goods, yet for the personal safety of their members the Europeans in Asia wished to stabilize and control the spaces they inhabited and the behaviors of those around them. By exploring the tensions and contradictions that arose from these efforts to stay safe, the authors of Imperial Contagions—among the best authorities now writing—offer not only fascinating accounts of historical events but fresh views of the processes often termed colonial or imperial."

- Harold J. Cook, author of Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age.

"Imperial Contagions takes us a step further toward more interactive, and less bounded, histories of colonial medicine in Asia. It draws attention to the pathologizing of colonial space, the heterogeneity of medical practice, and the fragmentary and partial authority of imperial public health. It leads us to consider again the late-colonial obsession with improvement and benevolence, and the relations of this self-serving and often delusory project to later national and international enthusiasm for development. An important collection, the book complements Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, edited by Qizi Liang and Charlotte Furth (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010): together these collections provide a platform for more extensive comparative, intercolonial studies of Asian biomedicine and public health."

- Warwick Anderson, The Journal of Asian Studies (Cambridge University Press) 73, 203-4.

Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890-1940

"This book makes a significant contribution to the growing study of age relations in modern Europe. Its localized context enables nuances to emerge that are missed by national studies, while its comparative element provides a new dimension to existing research on youth... he adds a new dimension to our understanding of concern over industrialization, particularly how it affected governance and voluntarism at local level ... A well-structured, genuinely comparative piece of scholarship that will enrich knowledge of urban young people, and particularly their place in political discourse. Pomfret achieves his aim of demonstrating the worth of comparative urban histories."

- Selina Todd (University of Cambridge), Urban History 32, 1 (2005), 186-7.

"This clearly structured book, which is written in an intelligent and accessible prose, is the latest addition to the growing list of historical studies of childhood and youth, although it is one of the few to offer a comparative account ... an interesting and valuable study that deserves to be added to all relevant reading lists."

- Harry Hendrick (University of Southern Denmark), Social History, vol 30, number 4 (November 2005), 546-7.