Peter J. Carroll
on February 16, 2022
Peter J. Carroll teaches Chinese History at Northwestern University. His research and writing has focused on urban history, gender/sexuality, historic preservation, and suicide in 20th century China.
Pat Giersch
on February 16, 2022
Pat Giersch is Professor of History at Wellesley College, where he teaches courses designed to help students investigate how historical developments have shaped China, East and Inner Asia, and the globe. He is the author of Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Roger Des Forges
on February 14, 2022
Roger V. Des Forges (A.B. in Public and International Affairs, Princeton 1964; Ph.D. in Chinese History, Yale 1971) taught Chinese, Asian, and World History at Middlebury College (1970-1971), Yale University (1971-1972), and the State University of New York at Buffalo (1972-2014). He has been a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center of Harvard University and at the Center for Yellow River Civilization and Sustainable Development of Henan University in Kaifeng, China. He published two monographs, Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution (Yale University Press, 1973) and Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford University Press, 2003). He contributed to and co-edited two conference volumes, Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989: Chinese and American Reflections (SUNY Press, 1992) and Chinese Walls in Time and Space: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Cornell University Press, 2009). He has authored several articles in English and Chinese on the Chinese scholar rebel Li Yan, who helped to overthrow the Ming before dying at the hands of his own leader. He has published several book chapters, including “Time and Space in Chinese Historiography: Concepts of Centrality in the History and Literature of the Three Kingdoms,” in The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography (Berghahn Books, 2007), and several articles, including, in Chinese, “Globalism in Chinese Perspective: China’s Roles in World History and Historiography,” in the Chinese journal Global History Review (2014), and, in English, “China’s Roles in World History and Historiography,” in the Sino-European journal Frontiers of History in China (2016). In 2007, he received an Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Education at the University at Buffalo, and in 2013 he co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Workshop on “China and India: Comparisons and Connections.” He contributed to and co-edited a conference volume titled Representing Lives in China: Forms of Biography in the Ming-Qing Period, 1368-1911 in the East Asian Series (Cornell University Press, 2019). Recently, he has authored his magnum opus, The Mythistorical Chinese Scholar-Rebel-Advisor Li Yan, a Global Perspective, 1606-2018, published in the Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography (Brill, 2020). He retired from teaching in 2015 and now lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
Kenneth Pomeranz
on February 14, 2022
Kenneth Pomeranz is University Professor of History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and in the College at the University of Chicago. He previously taught at the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses mostly on China, but also touches on comparative and world history. Most of his research is in social, economic, and environmental history, and he has also worked on state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and other topics. He has written, edited, or coedited 11 books, including the prize-winning The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000), The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (University of California Press, 1993), and The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (with Steven Topik, now in its 4th edition, Routlegde, 2018). Pomeranz is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy, and was President of the American Historical Association in 2013. He was awarded the Dan David Prize for 2019, and the Toynbee Prize for World History for 2020, and is the only two-time winner of the American Historical Association’s Fairbank prize for the year’s best new book on East Asian history. His current projects include a book called Why Is China So Big? which tries to explain, from various perspectives, how and why contemporary China’s huge land mass and population have wound up forming a single political unit, a co-authored book on economic development in the Anthropocene, and a co-authored world history textbook for introductory college-level courses. He also serves as Faculty Director of the University of Chicago campus in Hong Kong, and as Faculty Curator of its heritage Interpretation Center, creating physical and online exhibits chronicling the history of the campus’ site on Mt. Davis and the larger history of Hong Kong.
Keeping the Flies Out
on February 3, 2022
The first time I rode a public bus in China, in 1985, a young woman came up to me and ran her hand up and down my arm to feel the body hair. Foreigners were like rare animals then: precious, strange, probably dangerous. Surveillance was constant and labor-intensive. At the Beijing Friendship Hotel, there were staff assigned to go through the trash, read any diaries or letters left in the apartment while the resident was out, check mail, and listen to phone calls. A Canadian friend who switched into French in the middle of a call home was interrupted by a secret listener who asked him please to stick with English. A phone call that a journalist friend made from my apartment to a writer named Liu Binyan—who was considered dangerous—earned me an investigation as a possible spy.
Norman Kutcher
on February 3, 2022
Norman Kutcher is a historian of late imperial and modern China at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He was an M.A./Ph.D. student at Yale from 1985 to 1991. He is the author of Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and, recently, of Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule (Published by the University of California Press, 2018). Kutcher has spent many years rummaging through Chinese archives in search of documents and hunting down evidence about the Chinese past in the city of Beijing. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and The American Historical Review, among other venues. His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and by the American Council of Learned Societies. He has been a Senior Research Scholar at the Qing History Institute of Renmin University; a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center.
Sherman Cochran
on February 3, 2022
Sherman Cochran is the Hu Shih Professor of Chinese History Emeritus at Cornell University. He began to learn Chinese immediately after graduating from college when he went to Hong Kong on the Yale-in-China program and lived and worked there for two years (from 1962 to 1964). He then returned to Yale for graduate work, and after serving in the U.S. Army, he completed his Ph.D. in Chinese History under the supervision of Jonathan Spence in 1975.
In 1973, Cochran took his first academic job in the History Department at Cornell, and he taught there until his retirement in 2012.
As a scholar, he has been best known for his work in Chinese business history. He has authored, co-authored, or edited nine books and more than 40 articles, and he has written another 40 conference papers and delivered 120 public lectures. Three of his books and several of his articles have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.
His accomplishments as a teacher and scholar have been well recognized. Cornell has given him the Clark Award for being an outstanding teacher and the Carpenter Award for excellence as an advisor of students. For his books he has also received prizes, most recently the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006), which the Association for Asian Studies selected in 2008 as the best book of the year in the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China since 1900. His latest book is The Lius of Shanghai (co-authored with Andrew Hsieh, Harvard University Press, 2013).
Akram Keram
on February 2, 2022
Akram Keram is a native Uyghur and Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for Democracy with many years of experience speaking, writing (such as an op-ed on digital Yuan for the The Washington Post), and researching China’s human rights, domestic and foreign politics, and security. He previously worked as a political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, monitoring, reporting, and briefing high-level officials on China’s domestic and foreign policies related to human rights.
Mark C. Elliott
on February 1, 2022
Mark C. Elliott is the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of History at Harvard University. An authority on post-1600 China, he is a pioneer of the “New Qing History,” an approach emphasizing the imprint of Inner Asian traditions upon China’s last imperial state and its modern successors. Since 2015, he has been Harvard’s Vice Provost for International Affairs.
Mekong Review
on February 1, 2022
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Mekong Review is a quarterly English-language magazine of arts, literature, culture, politics, the environment, and society in Asia, written by people from the region or those who know it well. From its founding in 2015, its aim has been to provide a fresh perspective: one that covers Asian histories, lives, and cultures through emerging regional voices. Its approach is close to that of publications like The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books—that is, basing its writing around new publications of interest—but its view is distinctly Asian. Its founding editor is Minh Bui Jones.