Engaging 'China': Perspectives from the Margins
Peter Bol - Harvard University
​
Peter Bol is the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning and the Charles H. Carswell Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilisations at Harvard. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is the author of This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford UP, 1992), Neo-Confucianism in History (Harvard U, 2010), coauthor of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I-ching (Princeton UP, 2014), co-editor of Ways with Words (University of California Press, 2000), and various journal articles in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research. In 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis and served till September of 2014. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database currently of 380,000 historical figures that is being expanded to include all biographical data in China's historical record over the last 2000 years.
Henrietta Harrison - University of Oxford
​
Henrietta Harrison is the Stanley Ho Fellow and Tutor in Chinese, Professor of Modern Chinese Studies and fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. She is a specialist on the social and cultural history of modern China. Her research interests include local history, rural north China, religion, and the experience of revolution. She is also interested in studying transnational history from a local perspective and interactions between China and Europe. Professor Harrison's first book was on the political history of Republican China: The Making of the Republican Citizen: Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929 (Oxford UP, 2000). Both of her most recent projects have been micro-histories and she has made extensive use of fieldwork in China, especially conducting oral history interviews and collecting village-level materials, as well as using more conventional archives and libraries. This has resulted in two books: The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village 1857-1942 (Stanford UP, 2005) and The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013). Before coming to Oxford she taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, and in the Department of History at Harvard University.
