Department of History

I am a historian of modern China, particularly interested in how information, ideas, and practices were produced, transmitted, and consumed across different East Asian societies. My broader research interests also include the history of economic life, micro-legal history, censorship, and domesticity.

I am currently working on three book-length projects. The first, tentatively entitled Phantoms of Empire, explores the long-lasting trends in China’s rich and vibrant cultural consumption of historical fantasies about the Qing Empire (1644-1911) from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century present. It examines how popular historical imagination becomes a channel to express and debate the desires and anxieties of Chinese nationalism and negotiate between fiction and reality, past and future.

The second, entitled Minor Chaos, studies how ordinary Chinese used the state’s law and courts to reconfigure and repair social and economic value in the aftermath of WWII. This micro legal history project traces and reconstructs how people fought over minor stuff, such as bicycles, peanut oil, raw fish, and roof extension, when the country was experiencing a spiral hyperinflation and an ongoing civil war. Combining my passion for history and cooking, I am also working on a book on the social history of home cooking through cookbooks.

My first English-language book, Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019; Chinese translation by Taiwan Commercial Press, 2022), explores how copyright was understood, appropriated, codified, and, most importantly, practiced by the Chinese as a new legal doctrine from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Drawing on a vast range of previously underutilized archival sources, I challenge the conventional wisdom about the incompatibility of copyright with Chinese culture and show instead how authors and publishers fought to establish their claims and protect their livelihoods. The book also brings an economic (and business) perspective on modern Chinese cultural and intellectual history.     

I am currently also the PI for IU's Taiwan Studies Initiative under the East Asian Studies Center.