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The legacy of the Qing dynasty in the territorial boundaries claimed by the People's Republic of China including the frontier zones that lie outside China proper. How the Qing acquired and ruled its frontier territories. Growth and migration of the Han Chinese population. How the dynasty's Manchu rulers managed ethnic difference. Consequences of Qing expansionism and ethnic statecraft for subject peoples and for the dynasty itself. At what point and by what processes did the Qing become China.

Historical scholarship on China during the Qing period, including the gentry, civil examinations, and the debate about social mobility; merchants, cities, and the debate about civil society/public sphere; taxation, local security, and famine relief; heterodoxy, collective violence, and rebellion; and rival approaches (neo-Malthusian, neo-conservative, and neo-Marxist) to understanding the high Qing economy.

(Undergraduates, enroll in 293B; Master's students, enroll in 393B.) This course explores the embodied means and meanings of "living" in ancient China, roughly from 1200 BCE to 220 CE, as a way of understanding the sociocultural history of the period. It discusses the lived, materialized experiences of the groups that originated from different cultural-geographic zones of then China, from the Central Plain and the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe to the coast of the East China Sea and the south of the Nanling Mountains. The material cultures these peoples once created--for the king's court, as well as for urban commoners and farmers--constitute what we will investigate along the way. Topics range widely from contemporary foodways, fashion, violence, and writing practice to cities, palaces, ritual monuments, luxury objects accessed by elites, and religious decorations designed for the afterlife. The weekly meeting is comprised of a mini-lecture and a longer discussion session. Hopefully, students will have a chance to visit Cantor Center for Visual Arts and study closely an assemblage of related artifacts taught in this course. No background knowledge of ancient China (or archaeology) is required or expected.

This course examines the fundamental role of powerful goddesses in Chinese religion. It covers the entire range of imperial history and down to the present. It will look at, among other questions, what roles goddesses played in the spirit world, how this is related to the roles of human women, and why a civilization that excluded women from the public sphere granted them a dominant place, in the religious sphere. It is based entirely on readings in English.