Directory of Scholars

A directory of scholars working in the field of Ming studies.

All information is self-reported, and everyone working in the field is encouraged to submit an entry, including researchers, teachers, and students. To be included, fill in the directory listing form. Long entries may be edited for concision. To change or remove a listing, please contact the site administrator.
Thanks to Sarah Schneewind for further editing.

Name &
Contact
Affiliation Interests &
Projects
Ina Asim
康怡諾
email
University of Oregon (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese pre-modern history; Song; Ming; urban studies; material culture; archaeology; visual culture
Projects: Completing a study on Ming Nanjing; digital projects on Chinese paintings, other works of art (textiles; jade) and Chinese gardens in various states of completion.
C. D. Alison Bailey
email
University of British Columbia (Canada)
Faculty
Interests: Law, disorder, violence, filial revenge, history of emotions, literature, statecraft, mourning ritual, Ming loyalism.
Projects: Emotions (especially anger); filial revenge and mourning ritual; legal texts; Qiu Jun (statecraft project with Tim Brook et al.).
Kathlene Baldanza
email
Pennsylvania State University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Social and cultural history; foreign relations.
Peter Bol
包弼德
web · email
Harvard University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: history, geography, thought
Projects: local cultural history 12-17th century, Ming founding, fifteenth century
Katharine Burnett
陶幽庭
web · email
University of California, Davis (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese art history/visual and material culture from late Ming to contemporary; issues of originality and individuation in Ming; late Ming art historiography; painting, calligraphy, ceramics, textiles, etc.
History and culture of tea; historical development of the teapot; the spread of Chinese tea culture (outside of East Asia) along the maritime trade routes, 1550-1800.
Projects: Book on Wu Bin 吳彬 (ca. 1543- ca. 1626)
Aurelia Campbell
金田
email
Boston College(USA)
Faculty
Interests: Architecture of the Ming dynasty, Sino-Tibetan exchange, Buddhist arts, artistic practice and production, environmental and technological history
Projects: My second book In Death as in Life: A Material History of Ming Dynasty Tombs (in progress), moves away from the imperial, monumental, and expansive and towards sites of much more intimate scale: individuals’ tombs. Focusing on the Ming dynasty, the book examines new approaches to tomb space, grave goods, and the treatment of the body in light of contemporaneous social and economic developments. .
Katherine Carlitz
柯麗德
email
University of Pittsburgh (USA)
Retired
Interests: history, art history, gender studies, fiction, drama
Projects: intersection of Ming fiction and drama with social and gender history
Chi-keung Chan
陳志強
email
National Taiwan University (Taiwan)
Faculty
Interests: Song Ming Neo-Confucian Philosophy, Philosophy of Wang Yangming and his followers, The Theory of Evil
Project:
Book Published: On Evil: Thinking Through the Wang Yangming School of Late Ming Neo-Confucianism
Ongoing Project: Habit as Second Nature: The Problem of Evil in Qing Confucianism
Hsiu-fen Chen
陳秀芬
web · email
National Chengchi University (Taiwan)
Faculty
Interests: Ming-Qing History, with special interests in medicine, mind/body, sex/gender, the literati and urban cultures; Religious healings of Daoism, Buddhism and shamanism in Ming China.
Project: Unruly Mind – Emotions, Madness and Medicine in Ming-Qing Society (book project). Xu Wei’s illness, madness and the Late Ming society; Human body parts as medicine in Ming history; Yangsheng knowledge and body techniques; Medical exchanges between Ming China and Jeoson Korea.
Chen Kaijun
陳愷俊
email
Brown University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: literature, history of technology, material culture
Monica Klasing Chen
陳茉尼
email
Heidelberg University (Germany)
Faculty
Interests: Art History, Memory Studies, Art Theory, Calligraphy Theory, Classical Chinese, Practical Knowledge, Print Culture
Project: My current project, titled “Genealogies of Visual Epistemic Technologies and Common Knowledge in China,” aims to identify genealogies of visual systems for transmitting and codifying knowledge of tacit or conceptual nature in printed books of late imperial China,
taking daily-use encyclopedias of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) as its core sources. Its goal is to determine, with the help of a visual comparison tool, what constituted common knowledge—or a shared knowledge base—that the readership was expected to possess in Ming China. The project will contribute to a new understanding of visual literacy in late imperial China.
Shiau-Yun Chen
email
Ball State University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Gender history, Legal history, History of Emotion, Violence and Family
Project: Dr. Shiau-Yun Chen (Ph.D. Cornell, 2019) studies the inter-relationships of law, culture, family authority and family violence in Ming China, with a special focus on wives and concubines. A specialist in women’s and gender history, she has published articles in Chinese language journals and, most recently, “Jealous and Violent: Constraining and Celebrating Wifely Jealousy in Mid-to-late Ming China” in Ming Studies 79 (2019).
Claude Chevaleyre
施振高
web · email
CNRS(IAO: Institut d’Asie orientale)(France) Researcher Interests: Social history, human bondage, law, judicial history and practice, disorder and revolt, Qi Biaojia
Project:
His main research interests are global labour and slavery history, social history of late imperial China and computational history.
As of 2024, he is vice-director of the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies, co-editor of the French journal Etudes Chinoises and a collaborator of the project ‘Exploring Slave Trade in Asia’. He coordinated with Juliane Schiel the ‘Grammars of Coercion’ working group of the COST Action ‘Worlds of Related Coercions in Work’ (2019-2024). He is currently developing a project entitled ‘China Human Trafficking and Slaving Database’.
Desmond Cheung
張海浩
email
SOAS University of London
Faculty
Interests: Ming history, the history of Sino-European encounters and influences, early modern world,the creation and representation of city sites in Ming Hangzhou, Ming statecraft thought
Project: Currently completing a book on the creation and meanings of the famous sites of Hangzhou during the Ming. Also working on a second book project on the history of locust control in imperial China. Publications include articles on locust control, Ming city walls, the history of Christianity in China, and Chinese World War II films.
Ilsoo Cho
趙一水
email
Seoul National University
Research Fellow
Interests: Korean history, Ming-Chosŏn relations, Qing-Chosŏn relations, Korea-Japan relations, Korean state ideology in late Chosŏn
Project: Scholarship and Reform under King Sŏnjo, the Mongol legacy in Ming-Chosŏn relations, Sino-centrism, Imperial loyalism in pre-modern Japan, Korean foreign policy during the seventeenth century, proto-nationalism in Korea and Japan
Timothy Clifford
柯靖銘
email
University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Late imperial Chinese literature and literary theory; book history in East Asia; the classical Chinese essay
Project:
My current research focuses on classical prose anthologies of the Ming and early Qing.
Sean Cronan
孔尚恩
email
UC Berkeley (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Early Ming government and society, maritime defense, customs stations, Ming-Southeast Asian trade, the tributary system
Project:
I am currently working on three projects in Ming studies. The first focuses on diplomacy in the Early Ming and the grand strategy of the Hongwu and Yongle periods. The second traces the development of customs stations along the Grand Canal and shibosi offices along the coast as means of integrating commercial revenue into systems of state financing in the late Ming and early Qing. The third focuses on the civil government of the Hongxi and Xuande reigns.
Hilde De Weerdt KU Leuven (Belgium)
Faculty
Interests: imperial political culture, urban and environmental history, communication networks, intellecual history, comparative history
Projects: Currently working on a longue-durée global history of Chinese political advice literature. In 2021 she received funding from the European Research Council and the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to extend her earlier work on Chinese state infrastructures into a large-scale collaborative project on the social and regional histories of material infrastructures (roads, bridges, city walls) (1000-1800).
Joe Dennis
戴思哲
email
University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Social, legal, and book history
Projects: I am currently working on several projects: One is a history of legal education in China. Another is on schools in borderlands, and a third is on the circulation of books. I recently completed a book manuscript on the writing, publishing, and reading of local gazetteers.
Rui Ding
丁睿
email
University of British Columbia (Canada)
Graduate Student
Interests: Material culture; foreign relations; political ceremonies and rituals
Projects: I’m currently working on an article about the food offerings in sacrificial ceremonies in the Ming court and the political and social agencies regarding the process of selecting, transporting, and distributing food offerings and rewards.
Peter Ditmanson
戴彼得
email
Yuelu Academy (PRC)
Faculty
Jennifer Eichman
艾靜文
email
(USA)
Faculty
Interests: I am a scholar of Buddhist traditions from the 14th c-21st c. I am most interested in the relationship between network and discourse. To that end, I have projects that incorporate epistolary sources, dietary culture, self-cultivation, and philosophical texts.
Christopher Eirkson
愛維
email
Franklin & Marshall College (USA)
Faculty
Interests: History of empires, military history, Yuan-Ming connections, Eurasian history, world history, political history
Projects:I am revising my dissertation on the legacy of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in early Ming dynasty imaginations of empire. I study how early Ming rulers and statesmen understood, interpreted, and applied the Mongol Yuan legacy as they negotiated the various boundaries (physical and otherwise) of the new Ming polity.
Jun Fang 方骏
email
Huron University College (Canada)
Faculty
Interests: Political, military, and social history of 13th-17th century China
Projects: Annotated translation of Mao Xiang’s Yingmeian yiyu
Qin Fang
房琴
email
McDaniel College (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Ming and Qing local histories (Jiangnan and Huizhou), environmental history, gender and family, situated knowledge in Ming and Qing, etc.
Projects: Transformation of Iron Painting and Jiangnan Literati Networking; Production of the Novel “Hong Long Meng” Via Album Painting and Folk Arts in the 19th century; Haining Seawall Projects and Its Impact on Local Environment in Late Imperial China
Edward Farmer
范徳
email
University of Minnesota (USA)
Emeritus
Interests: My interests include Ming history in general; gazetteer illustrations; comparative perspectives on Ming history; global perspectives on Ming history. I am also involved in publishing projects related to the Ming history research series.
Projects: I have just completed a book entitle Humans — The Story of Our Past: The Challenge to Our Future
Michael Farris
傅立山
email
Tunghai University 東海大學 (Taiwan)
Graduate Student
Interests: Intellectual History, philosophy, interactions with Europe/North America, religious and/or philosophical syncretism.
Projects: The effects of cultural bias on Chinese philosophical concepts from a historical perspective.
Ruiying Gao
email
Wake Forest University
Faculty
Interests: Art History and Visual Culture; History of the Book; History of Science and Medicine
Projects: Materia Medica (Bencao) Images in the Ming
Anne Gerritsen
何安娜
web · email

University of Warwick (UK)
Faculty
Projects: Global Jingdezhen: Local Manufactures and Early Modern Global Connections. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the manufacture, design, export and consumption of Chinese ceramics changed profoundly, and those changes, in turn, transformed many different parts of the world.
Noelle Giuffrida
焦娜薇
email
Ball State University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese art, particularly the history of collecting and exhibiting premodern works in American museums after World War II and the visual culture of Daoism in late imperial China.
Projects: selected publications: “Transcendence, Thunder, and Exorcism: Images of the Daoist Patriarch Zhang Daoling in Paintings and Prints” in On Telling Images of China: Essays on Narrative and Figure Painting, edited by Shane McCausland and Yin Hwang (Hong Kong University Press, 2012); “The Right Stuff: Chinese Art Treasures’ Landing in Early 1960s America”
in The Reception of Chinese Art Across Cultures, edited by Michelle Y. L. Huang (Cambridge Scholars, 2012)
work in progress: “Apotheosis, Ascension, and Intervention: Constructing Visual Narratives for Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior”;”Imagining Immortal Patriarchs: Portraits of Xu Xun and Lu Dongbin in Ming and Qing China”; Separating Sheep from Goats: Collecting and Displaying Chinese Painting in 1950s-60s America
Noa Grass
高諾雅
email
The Hebrew University (Israel)
Independent Scholarc
Interests: State formation, public finance, money, and fiscal policy in Ming China, and the unique trajectory of Chinese political economy during the late imperial period.
Projects:My current research examines different aspects of government finance and management in the fifteenth century, before the advent of silver, as well as the breeding and management of horses.
Scott Gregory
葛思平
email
University of Arizona
Faculty
Interests: I am interested in the development of vernacular fiction and the interactions of the genre with the changing culture of the printed book.
Projects: I am currently researching commercially-printed “benchao” historical fiction of the late Ming that depicts events from the dynasty’s early years.
Yiming Ha
哈一鳴
web · email
Hong Kong Baptist University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Yuan and Ming military history, institutional history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state formation, military-fiscal state
Projects: My dissertation explored the imposition of a demonetized mode of military service that was dependent on self-sufficient and self-replicating hereditary military households by the Mongol-Yuan and the adoption of this military system by the Ming. It stresses the Ming’s inheritance of Mongol institutions and policies and looks into how both the Yuan and the Ming dealt with similar issues, using very similar methods, within the military that arose due to long-term socio-economic changes. It seeks to revise our understanding of Yuan and Ming military history by demonstrating the state’s adaptability in responding to different challenges and by arguing that despite institutional constraints, both the Yuan and the Ming were very successful in keeping the military intact.Additionally, I am also interested in positing the Ming within a Eurasian framework. As one of the several post-Mongol imperial formations that arose in the late 14th century, the Ming shares many similarities with other Eurasian polities, most notably the Timurids and Muscovy. By comparing practices of these other polities concerning military mobilization and organization, I hope that my project will allow for a better understanding of the Mongols’ institutional legacy in China and will bring clarity to links and issues that are not immediately clear from studying China in isolation.
Kenneth Hammond
韓慕肯
email
New Mexico State University (USA)
Retired Faculty
Interests: Intellectual and political culture. Early capitalism in China. Confucian thought and society. Gardens. Biography.
Projects: Work on Wang Shizhen 王世貞 and 16th century political and literary culture. Intersections and influences between commercialization and intellectual culture. Wang Shizhen as political actor and the nature of political association in the middle Ming.
Rivi Handler-Spitz
韓若愚
web · email
Macalester College (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Late Ming literature, essays, history of education, intellectual history, East-West comparative literature
Projects: interactions between students and teachers (mentors & disciples), recorded conversations 語錄 (yulu)
Feng He
何峰
email
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (Germany)
Graduate Student
Interests: Art history and material culture, including ceramic, painting, book illustration, gendered materials, antiquarianism, and social actors.
Projects: My dissertation project focuses on Ming and Qing porcelain in early modern German collections, and the role of East Asian monumental porcelain in the reshaping of European antiquarianism during the long eighteenth century. Past projects includes painting and patronage in Nanjing during the transition of Ming and Qing dynasties, socialist-realism artists trained in Shanghai meishu zhuanke xuexiao (上海美術專科學校, 1959-), and global reception of ‘Coromandel’ lacquer screens produced during the late Ming and early Qing China.
Robert E Hegel
何谷理
email
Washington University St Louis (USA)
Retired Faculty
Interests: Narrative fiction in classical and vernacular languages; popular and elite theater; book culture, printing, and circulation; illustrated texts. Representations of moral choices and indications of right and wrong in political, ethical/moral, and legal terms.
Projects: The early development of the novel during the middle and late Ming; the refinement of conventions and the range of experimentation with the form.
Martin Heijdra
何義壯
email
Princeton University (USA)
Librarian
Interests: 1. History of the book, esp. typography
2. Socio-economic history
Natasha Heller
賀耐嫻
email
University of Virgina (USA)
Faculty
Interests: religion, Buddhism, intellectual and cultural history
Roland L. Higgins
夏樂南 Follow on Academia.edu
Faculty (retired) Interests: Late Imperial China (Song-Qing), political, diplomatic, and military history, including, Sino-Japanese (esp. tribute-trade, diplomacy, and war), Sino-Mongol (trade and war), Sino-Korean (tributary relations), and Sino-European relations (China’s views of Jesuits, Portuguese and international maritime trade), Northern border and Coastal Defense, the Ming Great Wall, Urban and other Strategic Fortifications, Chinese Maritime History, Piracy and Smuggling, Shipbuilding, Archaeology, Zheng He’s voyages, Harbors and Ports from Zhejiang to Guangdong, and the Silk Road.
Kayi Ho
何嘉誼
email
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Faculty
Interests: ancient Chinese painting, Chinese court art, religious painting of the Ming and Qing periods, artistic and cultural interactions in East Asia, and the history of art collecting
Projects: Principal Investigator, “Ming court Painting of the Hongzhi Reign (1487-1505): Emperor, Painters, and Their Legacy.”
Hu Xiaobai
胡箫白
email
University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests:Urban Culture; Popular Religion; East Asian Knowledge Circulation; Comparative Frontier History
Projects: My current research focuses on urban culture of Ming-Qing Nanjing and Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming and early-Qing time.
Amy Huang
黃書梅
email
Brown University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests:Landscape paintings, print culture, Late Ming culture, collecting practice, Ming-Qing”transition”
Projects: Late Ming-Early Qing Nanjing paintings
Hu Yongguang
胡永光
email
James Madison University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Civil Service Examinations, Governmental Education, Neo-Confucianism, Early Ming Society
Ming-shui Hung
洪銘水
email
Brooklyn College-CUNY (USA), Retiree; Tunghai University, Taiwan Interests: Late Ming literary & Intellectual history; Chinese writers of the May Fourth Era; Taiwanese Classical poetry in Ming-Qing & Japanese colonial periods; Contemporary Taiwan Aboriginal writers
Projects: Critics of Neo-Confucianism in Late Ming
Book: The Romantic Vision of Yuan Hung-tao, Late Ming Poet and Critic, Taipei: Bookman Books LTD, 1997
Article:「明末文化烈士李卓吾的生死觀」,東海學報 37卷(1998),43-62
Li-ling Hsiao
蕭麗玲
email
Taiwan
Faculty
Interests: Book illustration, Drama, Painting, Poetry, Print culture
Projects: Published book: The Eternal Present of the Past: Performance, Illustration, and Reading in the Wanli Period (1573-1619) [Leiden: Brill, 2007]
Current: Drama Illustration as Drama Criticism: Political Loyalty vs. Filial Piety in The Late Ming Illustrated Editions of Pipa ji
Future Projects: Beyond Words: Pictorial Metaphor in the Ten Bamboo Studio Stationery Catalogue
Jiang Yonglin
姜永琳
email
Bryn Mawr College (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese Law; Chinese ethnicity; Chinese identity
Projects: Legal culture in the late Ming; Miao law and culture since the Ming dynasty
Kun Jiao
焦堃
email
Wuhan University (Canada)
Faculty
Interests: The Yangming school and the political history of the Ming; relationship between Ming China and Korea
Projects: The Yangming school and the partisan conflicts at the Ming court; Intellectual exchanges and diplomatic disputes between Ming China and Korea during the Wanli Korean War.
Philip Kafalas
高化嵐
email
Georgetown University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Late-imperial non-fiction prose, especially personal reminiscences and memoirs; the subjective elements of biji; architecture, place and dream as structuring written memory of self; literary depictions of music making.
Projects: The Songchuang mengyu 松窗夢語 of Zhang Han (張瀚 1510-1593) as a form of memoir that draws on categories of knowledge from leishu (encyclopedias) to depict its author’s experience of the world.
Theresa Kelleher
email
Manhattanville College (USA)
Faculty
Macabe Keliher
web · email
Southern Methodist University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Law, political organization, ritual
Projects: currently working on a book on postwar economic development in East Asia, tentatively titled Economic Warfare and Manufacturing Capacity in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, 1950-1990. The project re-examines the world’s greatest economic growth story through the case of Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan by asking a simple question: How do newly industrialized countries acquire manufacturing capacity? Converse to traditional interpretations of markets or states, his research shows how countries locked in economic warfare worked transnationally to develop upstream industries and spur the manufacturing capacity of neighboring states.
Elizabeth Kindall
金漪妮
web · email
University of St. Thomas (USA)
Faculty
Interests: landscape painting, topographical/place painting, function and visual experience in art, Huang Xiangjian 黃向堅, southwest China, Ming-Qing transition
Projects: current research focuses on farewell culture and landscape identity; and representations of the Yandang mountain range in Chinese painting.
Chunghao Kuo
郭忠豪
email
NYU (Taiwan)
Graduate Student
Interests: Material culture, Food culture, Animal culture
Projects: Food Study in Early Modern China
Sunkyu Lee 李善圭
email
KU Leuven (Belgium)
Postdoctoral Researcher
Interests: Northern and Maritime Border, Late Ming Intellectual History, History of Cartography
Projects:
Her dissertation, “The Cartographic Construction of Borders in Ming China, 1368-1644,” investigates the role of maps in facilitating a new vision of frontier spaces that were demarcated by clear boundaries between Ming and the outside world. Comparing two geographically different frontier spaces—northern steppe and southern maritime frontiers, her research elucidates how the cartographic transformation was closely intertwined with political and intellectual endeavors to create new territorial and cultural identities in the age of increasing transregional contacts. Her current research project, titled ‘Steppe, Forest, and River: Wall Histories in East Asia between the fifteenth- and seventeenth- centuries’ investigates how wall-building emerged as a dominant strategy across multiple, geographically disparate frontiers of early modern East Asia. Using digital technologies, her project aims to visualize cross-regional patterns of boundary-making practices. At the same time, she is interested in illustrating how local ecology and technological knowledge interacted with material outcomes.
Yuhang Li
李雨航
email
University of Wisconsin at Madison (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Gender and material practice, the cult of Guanyin and image making, women artists, history of Chinese textile and costume, opera and Chinese visual culture
Ivy Maria Lim
林美玲
email
Humanities and Social Studies Education, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese lineage organizations, social history of the Ming dynasty, as well as the history of Japanese piracy in Ming China.
Projects: currently working on the history of Jiangnan market towns and literati social networks in the late imperial period and is also pursuing secondary lines of research into the history of Chinese education and citizenship education in Singapore.
Haiwei Liu
刘海威
email
Shanghai Tech University
Faculty
Interests: Early Ming politics; the Yuan-Ming transition
Projects: Construction of political legitimacy during the Yuan and early Ming periods
Jing Liu
劉晶
email
Syracuse University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Ming China, Ming-Qing transition, Northeast Asian history, maritime history, borderlands.
Projects: Ming China and Chosŏn Korea’s maritime interactions in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.
Peng Liu
劉鵬
email
Columbia University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: My research is concerned with the intersection of late imperial Chinese fiction and Daoism. I examine how the Chinese novel uses religious elements to narrate the story, which makes religious ideas accessible to common readers, thereby bridging the gap between religious and secular discourses.
Yiqing Lin
林毅青
web · email
Columbia University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: History of Science, Knowledge and Technology (Mining, Metallurgy, Shipbuilding), Social History (Local Elites, Migrant Communities), Human Geography (Cultural Landscape), Maritime History, Migrant History, Urban History, Frontier History, Local Gazetteers, History of Paleontology
Projects: Overseas Fujianese Networks since 1500; Landscape and Cultural Space of Jinan in Ming Dynasty; Inland Migrants and Travelers in Yunnan in 16th and 17th centuries
Chentong Lu
email
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (China)
Faculty
Interests: Premodern intellectual history, religions, art history
Projects: 14th century Confucianism, Daoism, Song Lian
Lex Jing Lu
email
Clark University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Early Ming political cultural history; Chinese physiognomy; history of beauty and masculinity; appearance politics; prognostication.
Weiwei Luo
email
Florida State University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Legal history and comparative institutions, religion, communications, material culture, economic history.
Projects:Ongoing: the publication and communication of financial information in late imperial China; inheritance in legal practices. My current book manuscript, which is based on my dissertation, focuses on property rights, state-making, and global modernity. Past: Buddhist monasteries in the 16th to 18th centuries. Future: an intellectual and cultural history of fortune telling in the Ming and Qing periods
Edward Luper
劉華
email
Independent scholar (UK) Interests: Xu Wei (1521-1593), Li Zhi (1527-1602), Taizhou School, moral autonomy and individualism, eccentricity and madness, literati painting and culture, persona construction, material culture
Projects: My past research focused heavily on Xu Wei and his construction of various personas through poetry. I am currently researching the poetry of Li Zhi and also late Ming material culture.
Richard John Lynn
林理彰
email
University of Toronto (Canada)
Emeritus Faculty
Interests: Chinese literary thought; poetry; literati culture; intellectual history; arts
Ma Linfei
马躏非
email
Art School of Renmin University (China)
Faculty
Interests: Dong Qichang’s influence on the painting and art theory in the early Qing
Projects: I have focused on the art history of the Late Ming from my advanced degree study to now. My doctoral dissertation is”Research on Dong Qichang.” In thfollowing years, I have gradually published articles:”Southern and Northern Schools of landscape painting, raised by Dong Qichang – the view on history of literati painting,””The influence of literature thoughts of the middle of Ming Dynasty on Dong Qichang ‘ s arts,””Confucianism in Dong Qichang’s arts theory,” and so on. At present, I pay close attention to Dong Qichang’s influence on the painting and art theory in the early Qing.
Ma Zoudan
馬奏旦
email
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Lecturer
Interests: Ming History, Social History, East Asian International Relations, Choson Korea
Projects: Ming-Qing transition, local history of Liaodong/ Manchuria/ Northeast China
Alastair Ewan Macdonald
email
SOAS (UK)
Graduate Student
Interests: Vernacular fiction, translation
Projects: I am currently working on researching the competing cultural mores evident in Ling Mengchu’s Erpai collections.
Stephen McDowall
馬蒂文
email
University of Edinburgh (UK)
Faculty
Interests: Ming history and literature; landscape; travel writing; material and visual culture. My first book, Qian Qianyi’s Reflections on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late-Ming Hatchet and Chisel, was published in 2009 (Hong Kong University Press).
Projects: Nanjing during the Ming-Qing transition; the afterlife of the Ming dynasty.
Harry Miller
米海瑞
email
University of South Alabama (USA)
Faulty
Interests: Late Imperial China
Projects: Historical Fiction, Translation
Sander Molenaar
website · email
International Institute for Social History (Netherlands)
Postdoc
Projects: Impact of coastal violence on state-society relations, influence of the maritime world in Ming society, digital exploration of local gazetteers, blue humanities, travel writing
Projects: Sander Molenaar is a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China’, which is part of a large-scale collaborative project on the social and regional histories of material infrastructures (roads, bridges, city walls (1000-1800)) under the supervision of prof. Hilde De Weerdt. His PhD research at Warwick University was concerned with the impact of coastal violence on state-society relations during the mid-Ming period (ca. 1450-1600).
Christian Murck
email
Geiss Hsu Foundation (USA)
Director
Interests: US-China relations; intellectual history; art history
Carla Nappi
那葭
web · email
University of Pittsburgh
Faculty
Interests: History of science, medicine, and technology; China; Central Asia; Translation; Manchu language
Projects: I specialize in the early modern histories of science and health, and of translation, working primarily (but not exclusively) with Manchu- and Chinese-language documents. In this phase of my research life I’m doing my best to inhabit my scholarly academic life as a kind of art practice. I work in the media of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.
Susan Naquin
韓書瑞
email
Princeton University (USA)
Emerita Faculty
Projects: The material culture of temples in North China, Ming and Qing; the cult of Bixia Yuanjun.
Margaret WS Ng
黃薇湘
web · email
College of Wooster (USA)
Faculty
Projects: History of medicine, gender, body, pain, techniques
Barend Noordam
email
Heidelberg University (Germany)
Postdoctoral Researcher
Interests: Military history; violence, state & society; empire/state formation; armies & society; intercultural perceptions & interactions; early modern Europe-Asia interaction (political, diplomatic & military); technological & cultural transfer; transculturation
Projects: Qi Jiguang (1528-1588): his writings, military innovations and recruitment policies in the context of the frontier defense of a sixteenth century empire. His policies and ideas will be put in the wider context of early modern Eurasian imperial frontier armies and technological change. In addition I will address the question to what extent he was representative of the military elites at this period, or if his figure was indicative of new developments in civil-military relationships.
Quincy Ngan
web · email
Yale University (USA)
Faculty
Lina Nie
聶麗娜
email
Texas A & M
Faculty
Interests: Maritime exchanges among China, Korea, and Japan from ninth to fifteenth centuries. .
Chang Woei Ong
王昌偉
email
National University of Singapore
Faculty
Interests: Social and Intellectual history of middle period and late imperial China
Projects: Neo-Confucianism, Literati Societies in 16th-18th century East Asia
Huiping Pang
彭慧萍
Stanford University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Ming politics & collecting culture
Elke Papelitzky
林珂
email
University of Oslo
Faculty
Interests: I am interested in the history Chinese mapmaking, maritime history, and China in a global context with a focus on the fifteenth to early nineteenth centuries.
Projects: I am currently working on two projects: A book on a set of early nineteenth century terrestrial and celestial maps printed in blue, together with Richard A. Pegg (MacLean Collection, Illinois); together with Mario Cams (KU Leuven, Belgium), I am editing and overseeing the translation into English of a book on the Chinese atlas Guang yutu written by the Japanese scholar Unno Kazutaka.
Hieu Phung
馮明孝
email
Independent scholar Interests: My research focuses on premodern history of Vietnam and environmental history of preindustrial societies in Asia. I am interested in the early to mid Ming period, with an emphasis on the Ming empire’s expansion. I am also interested in history of science, technology, and environment during the Ming dynasty.
Projects: The title of my book manuscript is Water Sphere, Wet Rice and the Vietnamese State in the Fifteenth Century. I argue that the local environment in fifteenth-century Vietnam necessitated the performance of new ideas and the development of new technology, which had been introduced from other places such as traditional China. Specifically, this project focuses on the relationship between the Vietnamese state’s agricultural scheme that prioritized wet rice crops and its commitment to water-related issues, such as the construction of river dikes and investigations into precipitation.
Yasushi OKI
大木康
email
University of Tokyo (Japan)
Faculty
Interests: Ming and Qing Literature. Society and culture of the late Ming and early Qing Jiangnan; topics such as Print Culture, Courtesans, Civil Service Examinations etc.
Projects:
Late Ming and early Qing Literati, Feng Menglong, Mao Xiang etc.
OKI, Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo. Shan’ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011.
Anna Pawlowski
email
Stanford University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Art history, late Ming/early Qing figurative painting, Buddhist art, popular religion and lay belief
Projects: My current project analyzes the Buddhist paintings of the devout lay believer and elite gentleman Wu Bin (c. 1543-1626), re-contextualizing his images as simultaneously sites of social discourse for elite, lay Buddhists and the monastic community and repositories of an individual’s understanding of popular religion and Buddhist thought.
Ihor Pidhainy
裴海寧
email
University of West Georgia (USA)
Faculty
Interests: intellectual history; Scholars, exile, biography, women’s lives
Projects: Yang Shen, Huang E, families in Ming, Jiajing reign; The Mingshi
Jennifer Purtle
裴珍妮
email
University of Toronto(Canada)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese painting and other arts of the Song-Ming dynasties.
Projects: Principally I study artistic geographies and artistic mobility – that, how, and why artists and objects move, and what happens when they do. In a forthcoming book, Peripheral Vision: Fujian Paintings in Chinese Empires, 909-1646, I explore the production of paintings in, and by natives of China’s Fujian province, as well as their circulation in a succession of Chinese empires. I am currently midway through a new project,”Forms of Cosmopolitanism in the Sino-Mongol City.” This project, which connects China to many other parts of the medieval world, also provides the scholarly foundation for the Getty Connecting Art Histories grant,”Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History,” of which I am Principal Investigator.
Bruce Rusk
阮思德
web · email
University of British Columbia (Canada)
Faculty
Interests: Cultural history, book history, material culture, especially problems of forgery and authenticity, the status of canonical texts, the circulation and classification of knowledge.
Projects: I am currently working on a monograph about how the category of the authentic was defined and debated from the mid-Ming to early Qing, in both scholarly and popular domains.
Kathleen Ryor
赖凯玲
email
Carleton College (USA)
Faculty
Interests: The painting, calligraphy and poetry of Xu Wei (1521-93) and its relationship to discourse on the body in the late Ming; military patronage of the arts and military culture in the late Ming; Zhe School painting; mid to late Ming art criticism and theory; relationship between Ming garden culture, painting, horticulture and medicine.
Sarah Schneewind
施珊珊
web · email
University of California, San Diego (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Currently researching the working lives of ordinary people in Ming.
Tim Sedo
司徒鼎
email
Concordia University (Canada)
Faculty
Interests: Environmental History, Statecraft, Natural Disasters, Locust Infestations, Environmental Governance and Disaster Management, Historical Entomology, North China Plain, Local History, Water Control, Agrarian History, Early Modern World
Projects: I am currently developing two distinct research topics concerning the history of environmental statecraft in Late Imperial China. The first is a full length monograph that examines the history of locusts, locust infestations, and preventative locust control techniques in the Ming and Qing periods and explores the global circulation of these ideas through early modern Jesuit networks. The second examines the historical meanings associated with China’s first fully historical hydro-bureaucrat, Ximen Bao and the various transmutations of his local cult over the late imperial period.
Bin Shen
申斌
email
Sun Yat-sen University (China)
Graduate Student
Interests: fiscal history
Projects: the transformation of fiscal system between Ming and Qing
Joanna Handlin Smith
韓德玲
email
Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University (USA)
Independent scholar
Interests: Late Ming and early Qing social-intellectual history
Projects: Early Qing social networks, friends, and trust, with late Ming cases as a contrast.
Immanuel Spaar
石善也
website email
University of Wuerzburg (Germany)
Faculty
Interests: Intellectual history, Ming historiography, intersection of orality and writing, language of the Neo-Confucians, the Four Books
Projects: PhD dissertation on the Ming thinker Luo Rufang (1515–1588); aside from this project, I started to take interest in Ming notebooks (biji), especially from the 16th century.
Lynn Struve
司徒琳
email
Indiana University (USA)
Emerita
Interests: Intellectual, cultural, and political history of late Ming and early Qing
Projects: biography of Huang Zongxi
Roy Sturgeon
罗义
email
Tulane University (USA)
Librarian
Interests: Legal history (esp. free/political speech)
Projects: Chinese legal history bibliography/book (all areas & dynasties/eras)
Article on free speech in China (past & present)
Kenneth Swope
石 康
email
University of Southern Mississippi (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Late Imperial Chinese military, social, political, and diplomatic history. Also international relations in the Ming era and comparative military history.
Projects: My monograph on the military collapse of the Ming was published in 2014. I published a sequel to that on Zhang Xianzhong the Ming-Qing conflict in southwest China, entitled On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger, (2018); the edited volume, “The Ming World” (Routledge, 2019); and most recently, Struggle for Empire: The Battles of General Zuo Zongtang (2024, Naval Institute Press). My current project is a study of the Three Feudatories Revolt, forthcoming from Routledge in 2026.
Michael Szonyi
宋怡明
email
Harvard University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Local history of southeast China; family, lineage and kinship; local cults; connections between China and southeast Asia; Cold War in Asia, especially Quemoy
Projects: Social history of military households (军户) and garrison communities (卫所) in Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong; piracy and anti-piracy campaigns in mid-Ming; tax and corvee systems; interest in Ming in contemporary China
Minoru Takano
高野実
email · web
University of British Columbia (Canada)
Graduate Student
Interests: Old Phraseology 古文辭, Former and Latter Seven Masters 前後七子, Registers of Language between Literary/Classical and Vernacular/Secular, Authorship, Genres, Anthology as Canon
Projects: Authorship of Tang Poetry Anthology Tangshi xuan 唐詩選 attributed to Li Panlong 李攀龍 (1514-1570), Emphasis on Vernacular and Secular Songs by Old Phraseology
Aaron Throness
宋德明
email · web
University of British Columbia (Canada)
Graduate Student
Interests: political history of Ming China between the 15th and 16th century. Specific areas of focus include the geographic statecraft thought of Qiu Jun 邱濬 (1421-1495); court controversies including the Tumu Incident 土木之變 in 1449 and its afterlives; and political interactions between Ming princes 藩王 in Huguang Province 湖廣省 and the operatives in the central court.
Projects: I am presently involved in a number of research projects. The most recent investigates invocations of the Tumu Incident in 16th century political discourse, and in particular during the tumultuous reign of the Zhengde 正德 (r. 1506-1521) Emperor. I have moreover produced two full-length essays engaging with Ming princes and their political interactions with the central court; both are presently under review with various journals and are in different stages of the review and publication pipeline. In the future, I intend to prepare a dissertation project that looks closely at the ways in which Huguang princes and the Ming state negotiated for, sought after, and compromised to achieve their political interests.
Tian Yuan Tan
陳靝沅
web · email
SOAS, University of London (UK)
Faculty
Interests: drama, sanqu, fiction, literary history, local communities and cultures
Projects: Mid-Ming; court theater and entertainment; Tang Xianzu
Brigid Vance
范莉潔
email
Lawrence University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: late Ming socio-cultural history; dreams; nightmares; medicine; daily-use encyclopedias; divination; prognostication
Cheuk Yee Wai
衞婥怡
email
SOAS, University of London (UK)
Graduate Student
Interests: Fiction, Gender and Sexuality, Erotica, Urban culture, Dress History
Projects:My current research focuses on the relationship between late imperial Chinese women and sexual liaisons as represented in late Ming-early Qing erotic fictions.
Chelsea Zi Wang
王紫
email
Claremont McKenna College
Faculty
Interests: Ming China (1368-1644), premodern East Asia, premodern empires, bureaucracy, communication,
information management, archives, organizational theory, digital humanities, public history
Projects: Her research focuses on the intersection between communication and governance in premodern empires. Her book manuscript in progress, titled Logistics of Empire: Governance and Spatial Friction in Ming China, 1368-1644, examines how the Ming state maintained control over its vast territories using certain administrative practices that modern observers often find counterintuitive and strange.
Richard Wang
王崗
web · email
University of Florida (USA)
Faculty
Interests: My research focuses on Daoism, Chinese fiction, and religion and Chinese literature of the Ming dynasty.
Projects: Exploring the Daoism and local society in the Ming as well as the religious dimensions of Ming novels.
I have published the following books: Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks: Daoism and Local Society in Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), The Prince and Daoism: Institutional Patronage of an Elite (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), The Ming Erotic Novella: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011), (Collated and ed.) Maoshan zhi 茅山志 (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Press, 2016/2018), (Co-ed. with Li Tiangang), Zhongguo jinshi difang shehui zhong de zongjiao yu guojia 中國近世地方中的宗教與國家 (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2014), and Langman qinggan yu zongjiao jingshen: Wanming wenxue yu wenhua sichao 浪漫情感與宗教精神:晚明文學與文化思潮 (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books, 1999).
Xing Wang
王兴
web · email
Fudan University (China)
Faculty
Interests: Ming divination and Buddhism (especially Pure Land Buddhism). Gender and culture of the body in Ming dynasty.
Projects: Author of Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body (Leiden: Brill 2020). Currently working on a new project of the study of the body and presentation of religious technique in Ming and Qing Buddhist miracle tales.
Yizhou Wang
汪一舟
email
Universität Heidelberg (Germany)
Graduate Student
Interests: Ming dynasty paintings and prints, gender issues in Chinese art history, female representations, courtesan and literati culture, urban history, Sino-Japanese art exchange, colour pigments and materiality of Chinese paintings
Project:
I am submitting my dissertation titled “The Enticing Thatched Hut: Courtesans and Gendered Bodies in Jiangnan Pictorial Spaces (14th-17th centuries)”, dealing with the visual representations of courtesans mainly in the Ming dynasty through the lens of gender.
Liuyue Yang
杨柳粤
email
University of Warwick (UK)
Graduate Student
Interests: Chinese porcelain; Material culture in Ming and Qing; Porcelain trade and consumption; Cultural memory and social history of Chinese art
Project:
PhD dissertation (ongoing): “The Social Life of Porcelain: Domestic Trade and Consumption of Porcelain in Early Modern China.” This project will explore the networks through which porcelain was traded, circulated, and consumed within, across and even beyond the Chinese empire, particularly during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. It seeks to trace the entanglement between industrial production, commercial activities, and consumer culture in early modern China, through which the commercial networks and mass consumption of porcelain as commodity and consumer goods were evolved. By studying the historical movement of porcelain trade and consumption, the pattern of China’s modernization process in Ming and Qing period will also be investigated.
Wei Yang
魏陽
email
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Ming intellectual history, literary culture, transformation of Neo-Confucianism, political and institutional changes in the late-Ming. Encyclopedias and popular history books published in the Ming.
Projects: Intellectual transformations and institutional innovations related to public opinion and public reasoning in the late Ming
Zbigniew J. Wesolowski
魏思齊
email
Kölner Hochschule für Katholische Theologie (Germany)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese thought and philosophy, Chinese religions, in particular Buddhism, history of Western Sinology and Christianity in China, Confucianism, and comparative Sino-Western cultural studies.
Project:
The idea of “the true” in Classical China.
Yinzong Wei
email
University of British Columbia (Canada)
Graduate Student
Interests: Intellectual history; Cultural history; History of the book
Projects:Marginalia and intellectual history of the late Ming and early Qing period
Alexander Wille
魏立德
email
Washington University in St Louis (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Illustrated fiction, vernacular fiction, huaben xiaoshuo, Feng Menglong, Gujin Xiaoshuo, narrative theory.
Projects: My current research project consists of reading the late Ming vernacular collection Gujin Xiaoshuo by way of its paratext. I have previously studied the role of gardens in Mudan ting and studied the visual development of the Monk Sand in illustrated Ming and Qing editions of Xiyou ji.
Wai-ho Wong
黃偉豪
email
Hong Kong Shue Yan University (Hong Kong)
Faculty
Interests: Literature, literary criticism and culture during the Ming-Qing period.
Projects: JIN Shengtan金聖歎; Literary Criticism
Eloise Wright
芮雪
email
Ashoka University (India)
Faculty
Interests: Late imperial southwest borderlands; local history; language, writing, textual production; spatial history.
Projects: My dissertation project is a local history of Dali, Yunnan province, during the Yuan and Ming. I focus on textual production among Dali’s scholar gentry to explore the transformations in their ideas of place, status, and history.
Suzanne Wright
芮粟杉
email
University of Tennessee (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Ming – early Qing painting and prints, generally.
Projects: Woodblock printed papers for letter and other writing and related imagery in illustrations to printed texts. Woodblock printed cards for drinking games. Currently working on an exhibition of Ming and Qing prints on the theme of gardens with June Li of the Huntington Gardens, etc. for 2015 or 16.
Ting-chih Wu 吳挺誌
web · email
University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: frontier history; environmental history; imperial political culture; political institution
Projects: My current research focuses on land use and residents on the Sino-Mongol borderlands during the Ming period.
Jiang Wu
吴疆
email
University of Arizona (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Chinese Buddhism in later periods, Chan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhist Canon, Early modern Sino-Japanese Religious Exchanges, Regional Religious Systems in the Jiangnan area, especially Hangzhou.
Project:
Transformation of Religious Culture in Late Imperial China
Studies on Yinyuan Longqi and his legacy in Japan
Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist canon
History of the Jiaxing canon or Obaku/Tetsugen Canon in China, Japan, and the West
Regional Religious Systems in Hangzhou (rrs.arizona.edu)
Encyclopedia of Hangzhou Buddhist Culture
Huiqiao Yao
姚惠橋
email
University of Arizona (USA)
Graduate student
Interests: Late imperial Chinese literature, print culture, intellectual history, history of Confucianism, vernacular narratives, hagiography, biography, literary genres
Projects: I am currently working on the hagiographies of Wang Yangming during the late Ming. They include chronicles, illustrated records, drama, fiction, and genealogies depicting Wang’s life events. By investigating their intersections with print culture and intellectual history, I hope to unravel the vernacular Confucian hagiographical tradition in late Ming China.
Wu Yinghui
吴颖慧
email
Washington University in St. Louis (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Ming-Qing drama, fiction, popular culture, performance, and media history
Projects: My current work seeks to bring the study of Chinese drama and performance cultures into dialogue with the emergent field of early modern media studies. This exploration originated with my observation that the common paradigms for studying drama today, which treat plays as either literary texts or theatrical performances, or as a combination of both, are inadequate to account for the distinctly fluid and heterogenous cultures of drama in early modern China. A thorough understanding of these cultures requires us to address the interface between plays and media in diverse communicative contexts.
Xia Xinyan
夏心言
email
Renmin University of China(China)
Graduate Student
Interests: Chinese traditional drama in Ming Dynasty; The relationship and communication between China(Ming Dynasty)and Japan(Edo Period)
Projects: My Master’s thesis was about a rearrangement case of Tang Xianzu’s Ziyu Ji 紫玉记. My recent interests are China-Japan traditional drama interaction in 17th century
Xie Yang
解扬
email
History Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (China)
Faculty
Interests: Intellectual history. Social and legal history of Ming China
Projects: Statecraft thought. Art history and social transition. Ghost anecdotes and legal history.
Xu Han
韩旭
emailCentral South University (China)
Graduate Student
Interests: Literature in Yuan and Ming Dynasty, policy and political issue in Ming dynasty.
Projects: Regime Legitimacy in the period of Yuan-Ming transition, Climate change in the late Ming dynasty.
Xu Sufeng
徐素鳳
email
Bucknell University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: Late Ming courtesan and literati culture; High Qing women poets and companionate marriage; intellectual history in late imperial (Ming-Qing) China
Projects: I am currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Lotus Flowers Rising from the Dark Mud: Courtesans, Poetry, and Politics in Late Ming China.” It provides a new explanation for the flourishing of late Ming courtesan and literati culture: the rising prominence of learned and literary courtesans was strongly connected to a new social formation of nonconformist literati, the so-called men of the mountains (shanren 山人) who gained increasing influence and popularity in mid-and late Ming Jiangnan (South of the Yangzi River). These non-official urban elites of Jiangnan fashioned themselves as retired literati, devoting themselves to art, recreation, and self-invention, instead of government office.I also conduct research on the phenomenon of companionate marriage in 18th century China, an era known for the revival of Confucian orthodoxy. It is striking that the central figures behind the propagation of women’s talent in the High Qing were largely prominent officials and/or classical scholars whose names were included in the “Rulin zhuan” 儒林傳 (Biography of Confucianists) in the Qingshi gao 清史稿. Women’s culture, once part of the “artistic and hedonistic counterculture” deeply rooted in late Ming Jiangnan, had become a legitimate part of accepted orthodoxy in the High Qing.
Recent scholarship
“Domesticating Romantic Love during the High Qing Classical Revival: Poetic Exchanges between Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and Her Husband Hao Yixing (1757-1829).” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 15.2 (2013): 219-64.
“The Rhetoric of Legitimation: Prefaces to Women’s Poetry Collections from the Song to the Ming.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.2 (2006): 255-89.
Jimmy Yu
web · email
Florida State University (USA)
Faculty
Interests: The history of the body in Chinese religions, Buddhist material culture, Chan/Zen Buddhisms, and popular religious movements within the broader context of fifteenth to seventeenth centuries China.
Projects: His first book, Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700 (Oxford University Press, 2012), explores self-inflicted violence as an essential and sanctioned part of late Ming culture.
Xin Yu
余欣
web · email
Washington University in St. Louis (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: family; lineage; village life; book history; merchants; Huizhou; the Late Ming; visual and material culture; digital humanities
Projects: My current research looks at the formation of printed genealogies as a new genre in the late Ming (1500-1644). Instead of seeing genealogies as primary sources, my research surveys the life history of the primary sources per se, examining their production, preservation, and reception. My research also explores a set of publishing practices that differed from those used in commercial publishing and are omitted in recent scholarship. Finally, by showing how genealogies as objects were viewed and used by semi-literate and illiterate commoners, my research illuminates the meanings of books and book culture in the minds of the illiterate majority of the late-Ming population.
My next project continues my interest in knowledge production at the grassroots and investigates the proliferation of written and printed documents in villages from the late-Ming to the Qing. These documents included land contracts, encyclopedias, village histories, diaries, account books, ritual pamphlets, and so forth. Rather than mining economic and social facts from these documents, I treat their production and reproduction as knowledge production practices. This research will show how written and printed culture at the bottom of society transformed people’s everyday life and vice versa.Recent scholarship
“Domesticating Romantic Love during the High Qing Classical Revival: Poetic Exchanges between Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and Her Husband Hao Yixing (1757-1829).” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 15.2 (2013): 219-64.
“The Rhetoric of Legitimation: Prefaces to Women’s Poetry Collections from the Song to the Ming.” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.2 (2006): 255-89.
Tsing Yuan
袁清
email · web
Emeritus Interests: Ming economic history, Southeast Asian connections, Central Asia and Islamic history.
Projects: Ming Jiangnan, Huizhou, underwater ceramics archaeology.
Judith Zeitlin
蔡九迪
web · email
University of Chicago (USA)
Faculty
Mo Zhang
張墨
web · email
University of Pennsylvania (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Chinese paintings and material culture, the role of local agents in bolstering artistic interactions, geocultural factors in artistic production during the Ming and Qing periods, representations of Chinese gardens and architecture, print culture in relation to social practice, materiality and historical viewing practices, Ming ceramics
Ying Zhang
張穎
email
Leiden University (Netherlands)
Faculty
Interests: Political history, gender history, history of religion, Ming-Qing transition, History of Confucianism in early modern China
Projects: I am a historian of late medieval and early modern China (14-18th c.). I am mostly interested in exploring the history of Chinese political institutions, literati culture, and gender and family. My current research is focused on examining the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and society in the Ming dynasty.
Francesca Ziglioli
email
University of Siena (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Early Ming, in particular Zheng He and the voyages of the admiral. I am interested about the political logic connected with the voyages (tributary system and also the role of eunuchs).
Projects: I am starting a research on the role of ZHeng He in the modern chinese policy. ZHeng He is been used often by the president Xi Jinping as a model of peaceful connection among different countries. I would like to study the role of Zheng He in the political message of nowadays (the usage of the history in political field) and also try to understand if CHina is reallt planning a peaceful development (see the white peaper of 2011) or if the real plan in the international context is to become an hegemonic power.
So, starting by a study on the usage of the history in the political message today (in particular ZHeng He ad a model of international peace), try to understand the intentions of the gouvernement of Xi Jinping in the international panorama
Jiajun Zou
鄒嘉俊
email
Emory University (USA)
Graduate Student
Interests: Question of Chineseness in the Ming; evolving conception of 中國; Ming maritime crisis; overseas Chinese
Projects: What is China and who is Chinese? How did Ming scholar officials interpreted their past to consolidate a new found identity?
Harriet Zurndorfer
宋漢理
email
Leiden University (Netherlands)
Faculty
Interests: Social, economic, and local history; gender studies; history of knowledge.

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