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Degree(s)

PhD (Cambridge), MPhil (Cambridge), BA (Peking University)

Research interests

My diverse research interests revolve around historical intersections among environment, economy, politics and technology, as well as around material and representational entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds. Whereas my formal academic training focuses on the Chinese middle period, my current research and writing agendas sprawl across different periods along diverse timelines for the purpose of subverting the dominance of humancentric temporal schemes over our historical consciousness and historical writing. A significant part of my scholarly endeavours aims at introducing theoretical and methodological interventions that may inspire new ways of thinking and writing history. I am currently writing about EcoGeohistory, 3D spatiality, more-than-human worlding and multispecies healing. 

Teaching Interests

I teach pre-modern Chinese history, Chinese environmental history and literary Chinese. I work with postgraduate students who study middle-period China with interests in political economy, political ecology, science and technology, multispecies studies, as well as the relationship between ecology and diverse knowledge systems (official knowledge, vernacular knowledge, embodied know-how, tools and infrastructure, medicine and healing, religious and cultural practices, etc.).

Awards and prizes

George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History, 2017

Program of Agrarian Studies Fellowship, Yale University, 2011

Ziff Environmental Fellowship, Center for the Environment, Harvard University, 2009

Publications

, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016

��Ordering the Yellow River for Ordering the World: The State Mode of Environmental Production in Northern Song and Jin China, 960-1234 CE,�� in Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in Eurasian History, eds. Philip Brown and Nicholas Breyfogle (Oregon State University Press, 2023)

��Feeding, Eating, Worrying: Chinese Food Politics Across Time,�� with Mindi Schneider, Global Food History 8.3 (2022)

��The Matter of Time,�� Verge: Studies in Global Asias 7.1 (Spring 2021)

��Xiong��an New Area: One Locale, Two Histories, A Thousand Years Apart.��  (April 2, 2018)

��The Journey of Sand: How the Yellow River Has Shaped Lankao County,�� Rachel Carson Center Perspectives (Munich: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, May 2014)

��Manipulating the Yellow River and the State Building of the Northern Song Dynasty,�� in Nature, the Environment and Climate Change in East Asia, ed. Carmen Meinhert (Leiden: Brill, 2013)

��Traditional Chinese and the Environment,�� in Demystifying China: New Understandings of Chinese History, ed. Naomi Standen (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012)

��Ponds, Paddies, and Frontier Defence: Environmental and Economic Changes in Northern Hebei in Northern Song China (960-1127),�� The Medieval History Journal 14.1 (2011)

��Changing with the Yellow River: An Environmental History of Hebei, 1048-1128,�� Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 69.1 (2009)