Professor William Rowe’s former advisee, Di Wang, JHU History PhD 1999, has been named to the Society of Scholars, the Krieger School’s honor society for its most distinguished doctoral graduates. Having taught for more than a decade at Texas A&M University, with visiting professorships at Berkeley and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Di is now Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Macao.

Di has written nine important books, five in Chinese and four in English, concentrating on the social history of Sichuan province and its capital city, Chengdu. Two of these books – Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2003), and The Teahouse under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000 (Cornell University Press, 2018) – won the Best Book Award (Non-North American) from the Urban History Association.