Field

Global History

Research Overview

Maps, foreign loans, and East Asian History are my specialty.  In my research and teaching, I explore the financial and spatial history of capitalism, with China as my corner stone.  I have taught fourteen different Asia-related courses and have completed a book manuscript on China’s foreign borrowing from America.  As a teacher-scholar, I have also systematically tested the integration of scientific map-making into undergraduate research and have attracted 198 students from 51 majors to experiment outside their comfort zones.  

Awards & Grants

• [2016-18] Student Course Development Projects Grant,  Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, University of Rochester.
• [2015-17] Working Group Grant, Central New York Humanities Corridor Program, “The Chinese Quest for Modernity.”
• [2014] American Council of Learned Society, ACLS Fellowship.
• [2012] Abraham J. Karp Teaching Award, University of Rochester.
• [2010] Faculty Research Grant, Fordham University.
• [2009] An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship, Fairbank Center, Harvard University.

GIS Mapping Projects

1. [Fall 2019] China in Africa: The Socialist and Capitalist Stories
2. [Fall 2019] The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: 1943 and Now
3. [Spring 2019] The Historical Silk Road and the Current “Belt and Road” Initiative
4. [Fall 2018] Empires on Railways: Great Britain, the U.S., and China
5. [Spring 2018] The World That Trade Created: Fifteen Global Commodities
6. [Spring 2018] How Did China Get So Big?: 24 Historical Periods
7. [Fall 2017] The Yellow and Yangtze Rivers: A Water Story
8. [Spring 2017] Rich China, Poor China: Twelve Chinese Macro Regions
9. [Fall 2016] Mapping China’s Economic Miracle, 1970s-2000s

Participants: 198 students from 51 undergraduate majors.  Creative works viewable here: http://zhang.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/mapping/

Other Digital Projects

[2015, 2016, 2018] Visualizing Traditional China.

Students picked up Adobe Creative Suite to create a personal “living history” of distant land. Creative works viewable here: http://zhang.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/china/

[2016-19] Debating Japan: A Class Project. 

Students confronted current dilemmas on camera and shared their arguments and evidence online in a vivid intellectual confrontation. Site: http://zhang.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/japan/

Graduate Fields

I offer the following fields for the PhD qualifying examination. For explanations of fields, see the "Program Formulation" page in the Graduate Handbook.

Courses Offered (subject to change)

• HIS 140:  Traditional East Asia
• HIS 142:  Traditional China
• HIS 145:  Modern Japan
• HIS 236A:  Digital History: Twelve Chinese Macro Regions
• HIS 236B:  Digital History: The Yellow and Yangtze Rivers
• HIS 244:  China in Africa: The Socialist and Capitalist Stories
• HIS 246A:  Digital History: The World That Trade Created
• HIS 246B:  Empire on Railways: Britain, the U.S., and China
• HIS 246C:  The Silk Road, Old and New
• HIS 293:  China and the U.S. since 1900
• HIS 342W:  Rich China, Poor China

Selected Publications

• Dollar Loans and the Fabled Chinese Market: A Sovereign Debt Story, 1890s-1979 (under review).
• “How to Put a Face on History,” Perspectives on History (American Historical Association), Volume 57:8, November 2019, pp.17-19.
  Link: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/november-2019/how-to-put-a-face-on-history-using-photoshop-to-connect-with-the-distant-past
• [Book Review] Elisabeth Köll, Railroads and the Transformation of China,Business History Review, Volume 93, Issue 2 (Summer 2019), 411-413. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680519000758
• [Book Review] David Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China, Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 74, Issue 4 (November 2016), pp.1125-1127. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911816001352
• “It Never Rains in America?” Review Essay on Sheldon Garon, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, Reviews in American History 42:4 (December 2014), pp.756-764. DOI: 10.1353/rah.2014.0109
• "Reform is A Bonus: The Networking of Upper-Level Officials in the Last Decade of the Qing Dynasty." In Sherman Cochran and Paul G. Pickowicz eds., China on the Margins (Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 102-149. Link: https://eap.einaudi.cornell.edu/publication/china-margins
• "To Be Somebody: Li Qinglin, Run-of-the-Mill Cultural Revolution Showstopper." In Joseph W. Esherick and Andrew G. Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford University Press, 2006), pp.211-239. Link: https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=9400&i=Table_of_Contents_pages&p=2