Rethinking China and Europe: Connections and Comparisons

A day-long conference presented in conjunction with the Southern California China Colloquium

Organizer: Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom (History, UC Irvine)

Presenters:

Robert Bickers
Professor of Historical Studies, University of Bristol. Professor Bickers specializes in modern China, and the history of colonialism, and in particular of the British empire and its relations with China and the history of Shanghai (1843-1950s). His work in this field includes the books Britain in China (1999), and Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003) (winner of the Winner of the 2004 American Historical Association Forkosch Prize for post-1485 British and British imperial history), a biography of Maurice Tinkler (1898-1939), a British member of the Shanghai Municipal Police. This is at once the study of a man's life in a world opened up by empire, of a quasi-colonial organ of British power in Shanghai, and of the city of Shanghai itself during its inter-war spree. His interest in the world of British colonialism more broadly underpins the new volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire companion series that he is editing on British communities across the worlds of formal and informal empire. He is also interested in cemeteries and photographs and their post-colonial lives.
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Staff/bickers.htm

Wai Kit Choi
Assistant Professor of Sociology, California State University, Los Angeles. Professor Choi's research interests include comparative sociology, urban sociology, and contemporary globalization. Professor Choi's publications appear in Contemporary Sociology, Postcolonial Studies (forthcoming) and in various edited volumes, including Labor versus Empire: Race, Gender, Migration (Gilbert G.G. Gonzalez, et al., eds. Taylor & Francis, 2004).

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
Associate Professor of History, San Diego State University. Professor Tarpley researches late imperial and modern Chinese history; cultural, social and gender history; and comparative responses to trauma and disaster. Her recent publications focus on famine in nineteenth-century China, and she is presently beginning a new project on the Mao-era Great Leap Famine. 
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10953.html

Richard S. Horowitz
Associate Professor of History, California State University, Northridge. Professor Horowitz’s research interests focus on the history of China and world/comparative history since 1800. He is currently working on a book on China and political globalization in the long nineteenth century. His publications include “International Law and State Transformation in China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of World History, 15.4 (2004).
http://www.csun.edu/~rsh58410/
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/15.4/horowitz.html

Ruth Rogaski
Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University. Professor Rogaski teaches the history of modern China. She also has teaching and research interests in the history of medicine, the history of science, and gender history. She has written on a variety of topics including orphanages, germ warfare, and martial arts. Her book-length works include Hygienic Modernity (2004), a study of changing concepts of health and hygiene in nineteenth and twentieth century China, and a second work in progress, The Nature of Manchuria, about the role of the biological sciences in the formation of Asian empires.
http://www.issp.sinica.edu.tw/hygiene/ch/members/ruth.htm
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9816.html

Wensheng Wang
Mellon/ACLS Fellow and doctoral candidate in History, University of California Irvine. Mr. Wang's research focuses on social upheaval and state buildings during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), with particular emphasis upon the chaotic period around 1800 when the Jiaqing Emperor and his officials had to contend with White Lotus rebels and serious outbreaks of highly organized piracy.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Professor of Histoy, University of California, Irvine. Professor Wasserstrom is cultural historian whose research focuses on China’s recent past, although he also has a strong interest global history and comparative gender history. Professor Wasserstrom's publications include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (1991), and several volumes of which he was editor or co-editor, including Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (1992 and 1994), Human Rights and Revolutions (2000), Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities (2002), and Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (2003). Professor Wasserstrom has done work that moves toward or crosses the border that separates specialized academic work from other modes of engaging with the past (such as textbooks, documentary films, and publications aimed at general readers). His most recent book is China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times (2007), http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=41638
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/history/faculty/wasserstrom/

Titles and additional information soon.