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Joanna Waley-Cohen's Teaching and Research Interests

Research Interests:

I began my career as a historian of Qing law and political culture and wrote my first book on the punishment of exile, which was second only to the death penalty in 18th-century Chinese jurisprudence and was used as an instrument of colonization as the Qing expanded its empire to an unprecedented extent. After Tiananmen in 1989 I shifted my attention to military culture and over the next several years published a series of articles revealing and analyzing the Qing militarization of culture in the 17th and 18th centuries and its relation to Chinese modernity. At the same time I have studied China’s interactions with outsiders in the early modern period; my second book argued against traditional views of China as isolationist and hostile to innovation. Current research interests include early modern Chinese history, especially Qing imperial culture and its ramifications; Chinese military culture; Chinese material culture; and a new project studying the role of food in Chinese social and cultural life from 1500 to 1900. I am interested in testing traditional assumptions about China against actual evidence and in locating China within global historical contexts.

In addition to core courses on Chinese history and civilization, my recent undergraduate courses include "The World of Goods in China, 1500-1900;" "China and the Silk Roads;" "China and Opium;" "The Art of War in Chinese Literature and History"; "Seminar on Qing History;" "The Boxer Rebellion;" "China and Britain c1800;" "Chinese Society and Culture." Recent graduate courses include "Problems in the History of Early Modern China;" "Frontiers of China: Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong"; "Art and Politics in 18th-century China" (co-taught with IFA Prof. Jonathan Hay); "China and the West." Whether formally in seminar or lecture format, my courses include class discussion, frequent writing assignments, and usually some individual student research. I use primary sources in translation widely as well as secondary sources.

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