William Rowe

John and Diane Cooke Professor of Chinese History
Modern East Asia, especially socioeconomic, urban history

Department Chair

Director
East Asian Studies

The Johns Hopkins University
Department of History
2850 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218

Telephone: 410-516-7580
E-mail: wtrowe@jhu.edu

Office Hours: Open Door policy
Dell House 1503A

Curriculum Vitae

I consider myself a social historian of modern China, with both "social" and "modern" very broadly conceived—I dabble in cultural, intellectual, economic, and political histories as well, and work on every century from the fourteenth to the twentieth. (One of the nice things about doing Chinese history is that you can still get away with this!) My first two books dealt with the nineteenth-century history of a major inland Chinese commercial city; the second of these won a nice award from the Urban History Association, and got me rather notoriously embroiled in controversies over the questions of "civil society" and the "public sphere." A recently completed book explores the consciousness of the governing elite of the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century, in the relatively prosperous and expansive era preceeding China's traumatic confrontation with the West. I am now beginning research on patterns of agrarian violence in a single, habitually war-torn Chinese county over a seven-century period. In all of this, I remain interested in studying China in the comparative context of other world histories. I am active in the Association for Asian Studies and in several national committees on China studies, and for nearly a decade have edited the journal Late Imperial China.

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