SUBSCRIBER SELF-INTRODUCTIONS (your responses requested)

My self-introduction:

I am an assistant professor of East Asian history at Grinnell College, and currently on a year of research leave in the UK.  

My main research and writing focus is a dissertation-based book on politics, propaganda institutions, and media in 20th-century China.  I look mainly at film, and since completing the dissertation have been doing additional source-digging on related issues of geography and reception.  I also work on transnational aspects of U.S.-China relations, and China's contemporary media-related policies and moving-image culture.

As a doctoral student I was advised by Joseph W. Esherick and Paul G. Pickowicz at the University of California, San Diego.  

I am a social and cultural historian of twentieth-century China at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Most of my work so far has focused on the countryside. I am interested in how the big political and economic changes of the twentieth century affected non-elite people in their work and everyday life. My first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots (Harvard Asia Center 2009) describes a community of rural handicraft papermakers in Sichuan. My current book project is on women’s work in socialist China, in particular the survival of hand spinning and hand weaving in the collective era.

My self-intro:

I am associate professor of Modern Chinese history at the University of Arizona, currently on a semester of leave at the University of Michigan.

The focus of my research is located at the intersection between urban history and the history of political movements, especially of young people. My first book, Behind the Gate. Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia UP, 2010) dealt with the May Fourth period but I have since moved to the post-1949 era.

I have written essays on 1989 and on the category of "youth" in  twentieth-century China.
I am currently writing a manuscript on Maoist China and Asian Studies in the US, centered on the history of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (but with detours in France). I have also started working on my third book-length project, a history of everyday life in Beijing's Haidian District between 1953 and 1983.

I was born and bred in Venice, Italy. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004. 

My Self-introduction.

I am professor of Chinese research at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia and director of our Centre for Chinese Research.

My research, teaching and translating cover on China since the 1920s with a focus on Party history (of the CCP, but also a bit on GMD) and intellectuals during Mao's time, but also down to contemporary events. Over the years I've become an accidental Mao scholar, as well.

Currently, I'm interested on the one hand in the Yan'an period, Mao's role in it, and the role of Party discourse and on the other hand contemporary relations between intellectuals and the Party. My last book was the edited volume, Critical Introduction to Mao (2010) and I'm currently revising a history of intellectuals and public life in China's long twentieth century for CUP.

I'm professor of Asian Law and Society at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA). Trained in Political Science at Berkeley in the early 1990s, I've written books and articles about the PRC's 1950 Marriage Law, the treatment of PLA veterans and military families, and various other topics touching on law and society. I'm currently working on the national discussion of the draft constitution in 1954 and its impact on constitutional critique in the Mao era and beyond, as well as contemporary protests among former PLA officers and Vietnam War veterans. In political science circles, I'm somewhat of an outlier because of the extensive work in archives I've done over the years but here I'm closer to home.

I was raised in the US and Israel. After military service (1982-5) I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hello All,

It is a pleasure to see this list humming with activity. I am usually a lurker, invariably finding other people’s posts to be more interesting than my own, but I will try to break out of my shell and become a more active contributor. The document of the month feature is a very nice addition, by the way, and an excellent way to initiate conversation. Anyway, on with the self-introduction.

My name is Alexander C. Cook (Alex) and I am an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley, where I teach modern Chinese history. I received my PhD from Columbia University under the direction of Madeleine Zelin and Eugenia Lean.

I am interested in Maoist ideology and how it is put to use in various historical contexts. My own approach to history is interdisciplinary, borrowing freely from methods used commonly in literary criticism and the qualitative social sciences.

Presently I am completing a book called _China’s Cultural Revolution on Trial_, which compares the Gang of Four trial with contemporaneous literary works to understand socialist conceptions of justice during the post-Mao transition.

My current research project looks at Chinese activities in the Congo region as a lens through which to see the changing projection and reception of the Maoist worldview in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s. (For some introductory considerations, you might consult my chapter on “Third World Maoism” in Tim Cheek’s _Critical Introduction to Mao_, mentioned above.)

Finally, I am happy to announce the publication of a new edited volume, _Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History_, with essays covering many corners of the world, and chapters more closely focused on China by Daniel Leese, Andrew Jones, Guobin Yang, Lanjun Xu, Ban Wang, and myself. (Now available in the UK and appearing elsewhere very soon…. Advance copies will be sold at the Cambridge University Press booth at the AAS Annual Meeting, too!)

Best wishes,

Alex Cook

I'm an assistant professor of history at Montana State University (Bozeman).

My primary focus at the moment is the interaction between bureaucracy, intellectuals & cultural production, particularly as seen through the debates over and attempts to reform ghost opera and other supernatural subjects. I am very interested in the connection between 50s/60s rhetoric & cultural policy and contemporary manifestations, especially as it plays out in the videogame industry. I also do work in game studies, and am currently working on a comparative study of the aesthetic experience of games in China, Japan, and the US with some colleagues from that field. In addition to the cultural side of things, I'm starting in on a history of Chinese mountaineering, beginning with an article on the 1960 ascent of Mount Everest.

I trained under Joe Esherick & Paul Pickowicz at UCSD, where I received my PhD in 2013.

Thanks to Matt, Mindy, and Jacob for getting this going.

This is Alex Day (aka Sasha). I recently (Fall 2013) began a new job at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where I am an Assistant Professor in the History Department. Before that I taught for 6 years at Wayne State University in Detroit. I received my PhD in history from UCSC, studing under Gail Hershatter and mentored by Chris Connery and Arif Dirlik as well.

My book The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism was published by Cambridge UP in the summer of 2013 (www.cambridge.org/9781107039674). I recently published an article in a special China issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies entitled "A century of rural self-governance reforms: reimagining rural Chinese society in the post-taxation era." 

I am now beginning a new project on tea production in Sichuan, focusing on the issue of the changing labor process and the rural-urban split from the Republican Period to the 1960s. I am also interested in continuing work on the politics of the reform period, especially concerning the new left and rural issues. (I wish I was writing an article on Chinese mountaineering or just climbing a mountain!)

Hi Everyone,

I'm Aminda Smith (Mindy).  I'm an associate professor at Michigan State University.  I did my graduate work with Ruth Rogaski at Princeton. I'm especially interested in the social and cultural histories of Maoism and Chinese Communism.  My first book, Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (2013), examined Chinese Communist thought reform efforts with a particular focus on the lumpenproletariat.  I'm still interested in (and writing about) thought reform, but I'm also working on a newer project that explores letters that PRC citizens sent to various government units during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. 

I work as a professor in the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University, Lund, Sweden. I am a former 工农兵留学生and Berkeley and Harvard post-doc. My heaviest book so far is Mao's Last Revolution (co-author Roderick MacFarquhar), a history of the Cultural Revolution available in English, Spanish, French, Chinese and Japanese, but – as if to prove that a Sinologist is not without honor except in his own country and among his own people – not in Swedish. My most recent book, called Spying for the People: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (CUP, 2013), was described in Studies in Intelligence as “an extraordinarily fine work of historical scholarship on a topic about which little had been known,” while a reviewer in International Affairs suggested that “it is hard to know who would benefit much from knowing this history as it is presented here.” I expect to continue until I retire to do historical research on intelligence, social control, and domestic security-related issues in Mao’s China, the 1950s in particular.

Michael Schoenhals

Self-Introduction

Many thanks to Matt, Mindy, and Jacob for creating this list and also for their attempts to improve the list model.  I enjoyed the Michael Schoenhals’ first ‘doc of the month’ and look forward to other similar list serve innovations.  I also appreciated the self-intro's and have added the recent publications to a syllabus, so please do plug your new and forthcoming works. 

I’ve just moved from Oxford to UC—San Diego, which is restarting the PhD program Paul Pickowicz and the recently retired Joe Esherick made so successful.  We plan to continue to train graduate students interested in modern China, particularly the post-1949 era.

Having written on the Republican era and the Reform era, I am now finally returning to the Mao period, the subject of my MA thesis.  My first publication is “Compromising with Consumerism in Socialist China: Transnational Flows and Internal Tensions in ‘Socialist Advertising,’” in Past & Present and an expanded Chinese version  “社会主义中国与消费主义的妥协” (Shehui zhuyi Zhongguo yu xiaofei zhuyi de tuoxie) in Journal of East China Normal University, No. 4 (Winter) 2013.  And I have a forthcoming chapter in a book Sherm Cochran is editing, The Capitalist Dilemma in China’s Communist Revolution: Stay, Leave, or Return?

Hi all

Thanks a bunch to those who put H-PRC together and who are putting so much unremunerated time into this! 

I'm Josh Goldstein, History Dept,  Associate Prof- for- life at University of Southern California. I did my grad work at UCSD and wrote a book, Drama Kings, about late Qing and Rep. era Peking opera.  Over the last 10 years I've focused on contemporary informal recycling and urban waste history but have very little written work to show for it.  Currently I'm obsessed with climate change.

Hello everyone,

I want to add my enthusiastic thanks to Mindy, Jacob, and Matt for setting up this dedicated cyber community devoted to PRC history. I hope to be able to volunteer more of my time starting later this year to help in any way necessary. 

I am a doctoral candidate at Columbia and have been trained by Madeleine Zelin and Eugenia Lean. My dissertation is a study of statistics and state-society relations during the first decade of the PRC. In it I attempt to answer a basic question: how did the state build capacity to know the nation through numbers? I have conducted research for this project in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi, Kolkata, and (yes) Toledo. My broader interests lie in the social, economic, and intellectual history of 20th C China, in Sino-Indian history, and in the transnational histories of science and statecraft in the 20th century. 

In 2014-15 I will be a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and in 2015 I will join the Harvard history faculty as an Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Chinese History.

I would like to add my thanks to the chorus of appreciation directed towards the organisers of H-PRC, I hope that this excellent initiative will shape the way that we work with one another over the years to come.

I am currently working at the University of York as a Lecturer in Modern Asian History and am about to embark on the process of reshaping my doctoral dissertation on the CCP’s elimination of British businesses from Shanghai into a book that explores the broader social and economic consequences of the re-ordering of China’s external foreign relations in the early Cold War within China’s urban centres.

The project relies on archival materials from the Beijing MFA archives (which were accessed just in time…) and the Shanghai Municipal Archives, as well as sources from elsewhere in China, the USA and the UK. The project examines the ways in which policy was formulated at the top and implemented at ground level from the Chinese side and on the impacts of the changing situation on ordinary people, Chinese and foreign. I recently published some of the preliminary findings in an article in Modern Asian Studies.     

PRC history has really taken off in the UK in recent years with appointments to key posts and plenty of exciting research events, including a stimulating workshop here in York last summer. I hope to be able to welcome colleagues to York again soon.

Colleagues,

I am an assistant professor of Chinese history at Tulane University.  When I began graduate school I imagined myself as a cultural historian, but with the prominence of politics in all aspects of modern China “historian of political culture” is probably a more accurate description.  I received my graduate training at UCLA with Philip Huang, Kathryn Bernhardt, and Lynn Hunt.

I in the past few years I have published two articles that might be of interest to H-PRC members.  The first is on land reform intellectuals, the second is on amateur drama troupes in the early 1950s.  A link to these articles and some of my other work can be found below.  My book, Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  I also have an article coming out this summer on land reform novels and the Maoist narrative of revolution.

Much thanks to the organizers of this list.  I have enjoyed the posts so far and look forward to seeing how our community develops.

https://tulane.academia.edu/BrianDeMare

It seems that I am the first Chinese trying to give self-introduction here. Hope that my humble introduction may attract more Chinese subscribers to reply, if the old saying 抛砖引玉 really works.

My name is Li Kunrui 李坤睿, a doctoral candidate in history in Peking University, under the direction of Prof. Yang Kuisong.

I am currently working on my dissertation on the anti-localism 反地方主义 campaigns in Hainan of Guangdong Province as a case study for the relationship between central and local government in the 1950s. Issues that would be discussed in my dissertation include: (1) The land reform between 1951-1953, behind which lay debate between native and southbound cadres about how to balance local specialties and the needs of a fierce class struggle; (2) The policy and reality of the treatment of guerrilla veterans, including the protests of native veterans in Lin’gao and other counties in early 1957, calling for the return of power to some native cadres who was purged for localism in the past few years to protect the veterans' interests; (3) The Communists’ control over Li people in mountainous central Hainan in the 1950s while the Party’s ethnic policy shifting from claiming Han chauvinism as the major problem to mainly opposing local-nationality chauvinism 地方民族主义; (4) Overseas Chinese and their influence in politics in their hometown before and after 1950.

I have visited two provincial archives (Guangdong and Hainan), 14 archives at county level (all are in Hainan) before finally collecting enough (I guess) documents, most of which formed between 1950 and 1958, to start with my research. I am now writing two essays, about the land reform and the ethnic policy respectively.

I really appreciate the organizers of the list, which benefits me a lot. Hope to continue learning more from the enlightening discussions on H-PRC.

Dear Colleagues,

I am an associate professor of Chinese history at Allegheny College, PA, USA.  

In the past few years I completed three ariticles about Chinese communist political culture.  The first one that was published is “The Social Construction and Deconstruction of Evil Landlords in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, Art, and Collective Memory”, in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 131-164, the second is “Speaking Bitterness: Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training under the CCP, 1947-1952“, which will be published this spring in the Chinese Historical Review; and the third one focusing the Recalling bitterness campaign in the 1960s, "Recalling Bitterness: Historiograpahy, Memory and Myth in Maoist China"  is forthcoming in Twentieth Century China later this year.

Thanks to the organizers of this list.  

To add my intro, I am sort of an interloper on the list, because my primary research interests are in the 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically in missionary publications in Chinese in the late Qing. I completed my PhD at Yale in History in 1996, and published Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857-1927 in 2001. Before that I did a MA at UBC and a BA in Asian Studies at ANU. Like my dual (triple?) compatriot to the west, Tim Cheek, I am an Australian with a US doctorate on an extended professional sojourn in western Canada, in my case on the faculty of the University of Alberta, where I am currently Chair of East Asian Studies.

I do teach on the PRC and have published some things related to religious policy and Christianity in contemporary China. However, I subscribed also because I have been one of the editorial team for H-ASIA for about ten years now, and have served on the H-Net Council for the past six years, over an important time of transition for H-Net. So I have a dual interest in H-PRC, both in the subject matter and in observing what the editorial team and subscribers make of it, especially given the new capabilities opened up by the H-Net Commons. I am impressed so far -- the "document of the month" is a great idea, and a great example of how the new platform can do things that listserv alone could not. I am looking forward to following how H-PRC develops and learning from you all.

Ryan Dunch
University of Alberta

Hi everyone,

I work on the social history of the PRC, 1949-present, from my home base at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.  A paperback edition of my book, City Versus Countryside in Mao's China: Negotiating the Divide, was released earlier this month.

I'm working on:

- Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism, co-edited with Matthew Johnson, forthcoming from Harvard University Press and including chapters from a number of H-PRC colleagues.

- A New History of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989.

- A social history of accidents in the PRC, 1949-present.

I also hope to someday write more about the Cultural Revolution in Tianjin.  I'm also interested in how the class status label system worked and shifted at the grassroots during the Mao period.

Many thanks to Mindy, Jacob, Matt, and everyone who has posted so far for getting H-PRC off the ground!

Best,

Jeremy Brown

Zizhuan:

I'm Daniel Leese, historian and sinologist working at the University of Freiburg in Germany. My research interests cover Qing history to the present, with a strong focus on PRC history. I have previously published "Mao cult: Rhetoric in Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution" (Cambridge UP) and edited a reference work, which some of you might know (Brill's Encyclopedia of China, Leiden 2009).

My current research is focussed on the reversal of "unjust" verdicts after the Maoist period, which is mainly directed at cases and petitions of ordinary citizens by way of looking at original court files, dossiers, letters and archives. A further project looks at the interplay of law and politics in the land reform campaign, based on the diary of CCP zhengfa official from Pingyuan sheng.

Best,

Daniel Leese

Greetings,

Although I would consider myself a historian of the United States, my research is primarily focused on foreign relations and expatriates (especially in relation to China). My current research project (which I intend to expand into a dissertation) is on American expatriates in the People's Republic of China from 1949 until 1972 and conceptions of citizenship.

I will be entering the History PhD program at Boston University in the fall.

A. William Bell

Thanks Mindy, Jacob, and Matt for organizing this productive and stimulating forum.

I am an associate professor in the Sociology Department of the University of California, Davis. My research has been focused on Chinese communism, especially society and politics in the 1950s. My book, Disorganizing China (Stanford, 2007) offers a study of everday workplace organization and culture based on archival material from the Shanghai Municipal Archives and interviews I conducted wth retirees in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the book, I look at patterns of work and authority as well as compensation and punishment.

I have been writing on the appearance of intellectuals as embodied political subjects within the Chinese Communist movement and then nationwide. Interesting issues of domination and organizaton and use of classification and identification, and identity and embodiment arise once the constituent subject is dispensed with, to paraphrase Foucault. My articles on this topic have appeared in China Quarterly (2003, 2007), Modern China (2009), Journal of Asian Studies (2010), and British Journal of Sociology (2013).

I have been reexamining the dynamics of the Hundred Flowers Campaign of the mid-1950s. Recently, I have published two articles in China Journal (2012, 2013) on this subject. They are related to my interest in the intellectual. The first piece explores how the Mao regime used the cultural elites to provide leadership in criticizing the state when their members were aware of the extent to which the regime had crushed opposition. The other piece argues that three different interpretations of the proper relationship between the intellectual and the state appeared, corresponding more or less to the May Fourth, the Confucian, and the Yan'an vision of society and politics.

Currently, I am exploring the issue of class formation in the PRC, not simply in the conventional sense of social inequality and collective action (or class-in-itself and class-for-itself), or perspectives commonly used in the study of capitalist societies. I am trying to take into account the rise of what Shiela Fitzpatrick refers to as "Marxist classes" in socialist societies, or highly visible, labeled populations in which their members had not had any common identity or consciousness. The uniqueness of this phenomenon seems to warrant a rethinking of class formation in the PRC and reevaluation of conventional Marxist or Weberian approaches to class.

Sincerely,

Eddy

Dear all,

   My name is Huajie Jiang (蒋华杰)，A PhD candidate in the center for cold war international history studies located in East China Normal University ,Shanghai, under supervision of Prof Chen jian and Prof Shen Zhihua.

   My self introduction comes so late since I poured my self into my dissertation and archival research in past five months. My dissertation centers on how Mao’s China, as a participant of global cold war in 1960s and 1970s , exported its ideas on development and revolution to African countries by providing kinds of aids(Which covered Military Education  Industry Agriculture and Health care).In short, my dissertation illuminates the dynamic correlations between Chinese domestic politics and its foreign aids.

   After defending dissertation in later May, I will move to anther planned project:” Dragon’s Third Eye: Mao’s Secret Intelligence Agencies in Cold War(1948-1983)”,which is very interesting but totally understudied. My project will focus on the“ Normal and Abnormal Functional Activities” (正常和不正常的功能)of Mao’s secret agencies, several questions as followed will be answered: what role did the intelligence agencies play in Mao’s policing making, how Mao’s idea of continuous revolution impacted Intelligence agencies’ activities domestic and abroad……            

    Meanwhile，I am now in charge of a data base construction in the center of cold war studies. The data base is consist of around one million pages of primary materials which collected from ministerial/provincial and county archives, it will be finished in three years and accessed to everyone. Since all levels of Chinese archives are now cracking down on historians(and situation will be worse in coming couple years prospectively)，We hope this project will benefit scholars in the future. 

    Many thanks to Mindy,Jacob and Matt for organizing this informative forum online.

 匆匆

Huajie jiang

Dear colleagues,

I also want to use this opportunity to thank the organizers for putting up this page (I particularly enjoy the document of the month!), and provide a self-introduction.

I am professor for contemporary Chinese history at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), where I specialize in historiography of modern China, nationalism, and in questions in the history of ideas in general. My last book was the edited volume Places of Memory in Modern China (Brill, 2012), of which a paperback came out in 2014.

Currently, I am pursuing a project on the discourse of science in the post-1949 period, entitled Science, Modernity and Political Behavior in contemporary China (1949-1978).

What might be of interest of the members of this group is the fact that our institute houses a collection donated by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) in 2006. The collection contains approximately 100,000 separate volumes as well as a variety of periodicals (approx. 10,000 bounded volumes) published from the late 1940s to the 1980s. It features an assortment of publications ranging from translated Marxist classics to medical textbooks, from philosophical and literary works to agriculture handbooks and propaganda pamphlets, from popular youth magazines to academic journals. The major fields this collection covers are technology and science (19,000 volumes), economics, industry, agriculture, and commerce (15,000 volumes), history and historical science (11,000 volumes) as well as literature and arts (14,000 volumes). This collection is freely accessible, an overview of it can be found at http://www.sass.uni-erlangen.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=162&Itemid=102&lang=de.

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you very much to the organizers for putting this together!

I was trained at UCSD by Joe Esherick and Paul Pickowicz. I'm now at UMass Amherst specializing in the history of science in post-1949 China. My first book, The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, was published in 2008. Since then, I've produced a bunch of articles and book chapters (some of which are still in what can be a very long publishing pipeline) related to a second project on agricultural science and socialism in China. That work is coming together in a book I'm calling "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Encounters with 'Scientific Farming' in Socialist China." The book explores the tensions and also the resonance between green and red revolutions in China -- that is, between efforts to transform rural China through agricultural science and technology on one hand, and social and political revolution on the other -- and it does so through a succession of chapters that investigates the experiences, in turn, of Western visitors to 1970s China, Chinese scientists, peasants, state agents, and finally educated youth. I very much hope to wrap it up this year. In the meantime, if people are interested I can direct them to the various articles and chapters...

What's keeping me busy right now? I'm directing a program at UMass called Social Thought & Political Economy (http://umass.edu/stpec). It's a radical undergraduate major that makes decisions on a consensus basis in committees that include staff, students, and faculty. (I like to think of these as 三结合 -- it works really well for us at least, since we truly do benefit from the different types of knowledge each group brings to the table.) And I'm organizing a conference April 11-13 for a couple hundred people (http://science-for-the-people.org). Many of you have undoubtedly encountered the 1974 book China: Science Walks on Two Legs by a delegation of radical U.S. scientists known as Science for the People. About six years ago I interviewed a number of them and wrote about their trip in a journal article (more will appear in the "Red Revolution, Green Revolution" book). When one of my interviewees suggested I get them all together again for a reunion, I thought that would be a nice way to "give back" to people who had helped me with research. It snowballed from there and has temporarily taken over my life. But it's good to be useful... and I should be able to get my head back in the PRC soon.

Looking forward to reading more on the list,

Sigrid

Dear all,

    My name is Cai Chen (陈彩). I am a first-year PhD in Chinese Studies Reseach in Lau China Institute in King's College London. My first supervisor is Dr. Jennifer Altehenger, and Dr. Simon Sleight is my second supervisor.

    My dissertation is about higher educational institutions  in the city of Qingdao(Shandong Province) during the 1960s, which would focus on the connections between the educational system and the political and social system, the local history and the national and transnational history. 

    Before I study in London, I was trained in history in Qinghua University, and then obtained my MA degree in history in the University of Bristol under the supervision of Prof. Robert Bickers.

     I am so glad to join H-PRC and to discuss with so many excellent historians. Many thanks to the organizers!

I am emeritus in the History Department at Eastern Connecticut State University, where I taught Chinese, Japanese, and modern world history. I did my graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying with Mauri Meisner and Lin Yü-sheng. My research is in modern Chinese intellectual history, much of my work focusing on the thought of Liang Shuming. I am particularly interested in the imagination of the countryside and its relation with the city, in conceptions of time, and in issues of the moral sources of social solidarity, engaged from a comparative perspective.

Recent publications include “The Country, the City and Visions of Modernity in 1930s China” in Rural History (21:2; Fall 2010); “Radical Visions of Time in Modern China: The Utopianism of Mao Zedong and Liang Shuming,” in the book that I edited along with Robert B. Marks, and Paul G. Pickowicz, Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China: Essay in Honor of Maurice Meisner  (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); and a biographical sketch, “Li Zehou” in Biographical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China (Song Yuwu, ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2013). I am currently at work on a book of interviews conducted in 1980 with Liang Shuming that will be published by the 广西师范大学出版社.

Dear all,

    My name is Yuqin HUANG, and am currently associate professor of Sociology at East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai. Even though I'm not a historian, I deal with some historical materials, which makes me believe  this forum a good place to come. One of my past projects is about the transformation of labour and leisure lives of rural women in a central Chinese county between 1920s and 2006. Currently I am working on a project on the returnees (海归) who were educated in the West and converted to Christianity while they were abroad. I have interviewed some comtempory foreign-educated Christian returnees in Shanghai, but I feel I also need to learn the lives of those returned Christians who came back to China during the previous studying-abroad waves, especially those returning in the early 20th century. I would extremely appreciate if any of you could kindly enlighten me in terms of literature and historical materials in this regard.

 Yuqin

Dear All,

My name is Chaohua Wang (王超華). This is my response to subscriber self introduction. My apologies for this delayed response, partly due to technical difficulties with my old computer (now a new one is purchased).

First of all, I would like to join the others to say a big "Thank You" to the organizers of this list. Many of you must be gathering in Philadelphia now. I wish you a lively, fruitful reunion there.

I was originally trained in modern Chinese literature but later one moved to modern history, earning my MA and Ph.D. from UCLA. My dissertation is about late Qing and early Republican intellectual history, with a focus on Cai Yuan-pei. It stops at the year 1919. I have extented my research to the 1920s and 1930s in recent years, still focusing on Cai but also more on institutional reforms than intellectual debates. These fall to the pre-PRC history.

Meanwhile, I have been following contemporary intellectual life in China for many years, sometimes participating in ongoing debates in Chinese, mostly published in Taiwan. A collection of translated texts by Chinese intellectuals, with an introduction by myself, was published in 2003 under the title One China, Many Paths. I plan to do more in the field and very much look forward to learning from all the contributing colleagues on this list.

Sincerely,

--Chaohua

Hello from sunny Leicester!

I'm a research associate and honorary fellow at the University of Leicester, UK. My doctoral research looked at the collection, interpretation and display of the visual culture of the Cultural Revolution in British museums and a book based on my thesis - Museum Representations of Maoist China - will be published by Ashgate later this year.

I am also helping to set up a research network for China scholars at the University of Leicester and we would like to extend an invitation to all H-PRC subscribers to consider submitting a paper proposal to our forthcoming inaugural conference, The 'China Dream': Passions, Policies and Power. Please see our website for further details: http://www2.le.ac.uk/research/current-research/chisra/chisra_conference2014

Best wishes,

Amy 

Amy Jane Barnes (Dr)

Research Associate, School of Management
Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Museum Studies
University of Leicester, UK

Thanks to Mindy Smith and Arunabh Ghosh, whom I briefly met at AAS in Philadelphia just now, for introducing me to this new list. I hope those of you who attended the conference had a successful and enjoyable time.

I am Leon Rocha, currently Research Fellow at University of Cambridge, attached to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies there, as well as the Needham Research Institute. I did my graduate work also at Cambridge, under the supervision of John Forrester (from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science), Susan Daruvala, Hans van de Ven, and Vivienne Lo (from University College London). From July onwards, I will be Lecturer ("Assistant Professor") in Chinese Studies at the University of Liverpool.

At the moment I am working on two projects, the first entitled "Harnessing Pleasure: Imagining and Transforming Chinese Sexuality in the Twentieth Century" and the second on Joseph Needham, simply called "Needham Questions".

It is probably easiest to talk about what is on my desk right now. I have two big piles. On the left I have materials from the Ford Foundation Archives on projects related to reproductive health and sexuality in 1980s-1990s China. This has just been presented at AAS and will go into the sex project. On the right I have materials from the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and from the Joseph Needham Archives, on electroacupuncture and acupuncture anaesthesia in 1970s China. This material will go towards the second project.

Many of you may also know me from the "Dissertation Reviews" project (dissertationreviews.org); I am one of its Managing Editors. Thanks by the way to the PRC History Group for linking to us on the webpage. Not only do we feature reviews of recently defended dissertations, we have a good number of "Fresh from the Archives" articles, covering libraries and archives in China. Please check us out every now and then.

All the best, Leon Rocha

Apologies for only finally getting around to my self-introduction now. I'm a PhD Candidate at UC Santa Cruz and currently writing a dissertation on 体育 in the early PRC, with expected completion date later this year. The first half of my dissertation covers 体育 in the 1950s under the new leadership and through the PRC's first National Games in 1959, while the second half focuses on changes that came with the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations (and building relations with various African and Asian nations), such as the increased emphasis placed on elite athletics in the years before the start of the Culutral Revolution. I recently had two articles published: “From Soviet Kin to Afro-Asian Leader: The People’s Republic of China and International Sport in the early 1960s” and “Elite Competitive Sport in the People’s Republic of China 1958-1966: The Games of the New Emerging Forces.”

I also have a background in IT and digital history, and prior to entering grad school I worked for several years at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, so I have a strong interest in the digital humanities. As a PhD student and teaching assistant I've helped professors experiment with things like a wiki for organizing data in a graduate research methods class, and using wikis and Omeka for undergraduate students' final projects. I also recently put together an AAS roundtable on DH in which I briefly discussed my own use of online Chinese-language sources, including auction websites (kongfz.cn), online databases (Chinamaxx, Renmin ribao, etc), official sources (library and archival docs mostly from Beijing and Shanghai) and unofficial sources (such as sina blogs, tudou, etc). I am interested in both the benefits and challenges such a multifarious approach to research poses, including how the research process has and is changing as a result of these kinds of digital and online sources. I sense from recent discussions on this list (and from the workshop held in Chicago a year and a half ago) that this is a topic others are also interested in. I hope we can find further ways to discuss this, and I also hope more generally that we can find more ways to share and collaborate with each other using digital platforms (by the way, I think the document of the month is a great feature).

I look forward to our future endeavors!

Thanks to the organizers of this network.

I'm Jeremy Murray, assistant professor of history at Cal State San Bernardino.  I'm still revising my dissertation, which I defended in 2011 at UCSD with Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz.  It's on the development of the Communist movement of Hainan island, from the late 1920s into the early years of the PRC.  The central figure is the revolutionary leader, Feng Baiju, who became a target in the early days of the PRC as a prominent "localist" in the anti-localism campaigns.  I've been studying the revolution on Hainan and Feng's role in a Chinese Communist movement that was often disconnected from formative experiences of their mainland counterparts like the Long March and the Rectification Campaign.

I'm also increasingly interested in Chinese cinema, inspired by others from the UCSD group, Matt Johnson, Xiao Zhiwei, and Pickowicz.  And if this Hainan manuscript is ever out the door, I'm also hoping to study more closely the Li people of Hainan, and their relationship with the Communist revolution and PRC rule.