The Meanings of Foreign Intervention in the Taiping Rebellion

The Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University presents a talk on the Taiping Rebellion.

Speaker:
Stephen R. Platt, Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Bio:
Stephen R. Platt is a historian of late imperial China, specializing in the nineteenth century and China's foreign relations. He was a 2008-2010 fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and gives occasional talks on modern and contemporary China to audiences in education, government, and the general public. At UMass, he teaches courses on modern Chinese history from the 17th century to the present day, as well as seminars on US-China relations, comparative nationalism, and the writing of history.
Platt is the author most recently of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, a military history of the Taiping Rebellion in global context published by Knopf in the spring of 2012. He is beginning research for a future book on the old China trade and the coming of the Opium War. He is also the author of  Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2007). Support for his research has come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright program, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation.