History
School of Humanities

Professor (by Courtesy)
School of Law

Historical Writing Mentor, Literary Journalism
School of Humanities

Co-Director, Forum for the Academy and the Public

Director, Humanities Honors Program

Professor (by courtesy), Political Science
School of Social Sciences

Professor (by courtesy), East Asian Studies
School of Humanities

China, Protest, Globalization, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Orwell

Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Birkbeck College, University of London
W. Bruce Lincolm Memorial Lecturer (Northern Illinois)
Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar
Visiting Research Fellow, Merton College, Oxford
John Fisher Ziedman Memorial Lecturer, Sidwell Freinds School
Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advance Study, University of Warwick
Associated Editor (and for one year Acting Editor), American Historical Review
Fulbright-Hays Fellowship
Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship (Charlotte B. Newcombe award)
NEH Collaborative Project Director
Spencer Foundation Fellowships (National Academy of Education Post-Doc)
Luce Foundation Support
ACLS Award

I am a specialist in modern Chinese history and global history. I am particularly interested in and have written about youth movements, cities, gender history, and dystopian fiction. Most of my books have been written with an eye toward engaging with not just historians but also scholars in other disciplines and general readers.

My commitment to reaching broad audiences shows through in other aspects of my career, too, including my involvement with general interest publications and with documentary filmmakers, and my role in co-founding and helping organize events put on by UCI's Forum for the Academy and the Public. It also has led me to edit accessible books, testify before a Congressional-Executive commission on China, conduct a State Department briefing on contemporary Chinese politics, and work with the Hong Kong International Literary Festival as an adviser until the early 2020s, and guest at the Ferrara Festival put on by the magazine Internazionale.
I am currently working on a book about Orwell and Asia, which is under contract with Princeton University Press for publication by its trade division.

I have contributed to many academic periodicals, including the China Quarterly, the Journal of World History, and Social History (for which I am an editorial board member), but I have also written commentaries and reviews for magazines (e.g., the Atlantic, Internazionale, the Nation, and Dissent, for which I serve on the editorial board), literary reviews (e.g., the TLS, the China Books Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, for which I co-edit the China Section), and newspapers (e.g., Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times). I have been interviewed for broadcast media, including BBC news programs in the U.K. and in the U.S. for public radio shows such as Morning Edition, The World, and Marketplace.

I was born in California and educated largely in the state, getting a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz and a Phd from Berkeley, while also earning a Master's from Harvard and spending a year apiece studying at the University of London, as an undergrad, and Fudan University in Shanghai, as a doctoral student. I returned to California to join UCI's History Department in 2006. Before that, I spent two years teaching at the University of Kentucky and fifteen years at Indiana University in Bloomington, where in addition to offering courses I spent a year as the Acting Editor of the Bloomington-based American Historical Review and served for three years as the Director of IU’s East Asian Studies Center. Once at UCI, from 2008 until 2018, I was editor of the Journal of Asian Studies.

Everything You Wanted to Know About China* (But Were Afraid to Ask), Brixton Ink, forthcoming February 2026.

The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), with contributions by Prad Sirisomboon [a pseudonym], Chinese language translation forthcoming from Acropolis, a publisher in Taiwan.

(as editor) Oxford History of Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020), with contributions by Amy Hawkins [out in a Thai translation from Sam Yan Press and in an update second edition just in the UK, published by Brixton Ink, as Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong, with new material by Amy Hawkins and Kris Cheng].

Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin, 2016)

(as editor) The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2016)

China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010; and a 2013 second edition, with contributions by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, out in Turkish, Korean, Indonesian and Chinese complex character translations; as well as a 2018 third edition, coauthored with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham)

Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, co-edited with Angilee Shah (University of California Press, 2012)

Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge, 2009)

China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times (Indiana University Press, 2017)

Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 1991);

Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, co-editor (Westview Press, 1992 and 1994 second edition);

Human Rights and Revolutions, co-editor (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000 and 2007 second edition);

The 20th Century: A Retrospective, co-author (Westview Press, 2000);

Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, co-editor (University of California Press, 2002);

Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches, editor (Routledge, 2003);

American Historical Association

Association for Asian Studies

Long Institute

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5310

Last updated
08/20/2025