Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
I received my PhD from the University of Hawaii, Manoa in 1999 studying under Dr. Dru C. Gladney. After teaching at Juniata College and University of Colorado, Denver I joined the Penn State Department of History and Religious Studies in 2002 specializing in late imperial and modern Chinese history. I have been a researcher or visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology, Yunnan University and at the Humboldt University (Berlin). I have received several fellowships including a Fulbright (2007-08) to the People’s Republic of China and a multi-year Mellon New Direction Fellowship.
Currently, I am Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies and have served as the Department of History’s Director of Graduate Studies since the Fall of 2010. My teaching at Penn State ranges from introductory course such as World History to 1500 (HIST 10) and Modern East Asia (HIST 175) to upper level courses on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century China (HIST 485W and HIST 486). I have also offered courses cross-listed in Religious Studies such asTibet: Sacred Places, Spaces and People (RLST 197A) and Islam’s Orient: Islam, Nationalism and Ethnic Violence in China (RLST 597C). Finally at the graduate level, I have co-taught the core seminar on Late Imperial and Modern China as well as Ethnicity and Borderlands in late Imperial China.
My early research largely centered on the ethno-religious identity of the Muslim Chinese (or Hui) in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. He has published several articles on this topic and a monograph entitled The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwestern China, 1856-1873 was published by Stanford University Press (2006). More recently, I have been dividing my time between two distinct projects the first on a re-examination of Qing China’s ’corridors of contact’ as seen through the eyes of Lin Zexu and a broad study of the Tibetan Muslims.
This past summer I delivered talks at Oxford and Cambridge as well as returning to Nepal, India and Tibet carrying out oral interviews with the Tibetan Muslim populations.
Recent Publications:
Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectives from 1644 to the Present (Co-edited with Yurong Y. Atwill), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009.
"Holy Culture Wars: Patterns of Ethno-Religious Violence in 19th and 20th Century China," in Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Traditions. Ed. James Wellman, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007
The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwestern China, 1856-1873, Stanford University Press, 2006.
"Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1874," Journal of Asian Studies 62(4), 2003