Before moving to South Korea, he worked in the Netherlands and Hong Kong. As a historian of medieval and early modern Korea, he is interested in the social, philosophical, and geopolitical factors that contributed to Korea’s adoption of the Confucian tradition. Cha is also committed to experimenting with computational methods in historical studies. His current project in digital history involves the discovery of unidentified assemblages using the agnatic and affinal data of 50,000 individuals and the automated classification of 198 million characters worth of writing. In addition to macrohistorical research, Cha has been dabbling in anthropological history in the Annales sense, capturing local knowledge and information using high-resolution photographs, audiovisual sources, and drone footage.