From the Social History of Books to the Social Life of Things: An Overview of Developments in the China Field

Speaker: Andrea Goldman, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA

This talk situates the study of late imperial Chinese book history—one of the first forays into the study of material objects in the China field—in the context of the various historical “turns” both internal and external to Chinese studies, including among others, the cultural turn, the visual turn, and the material turn. Chinese book history, a pioneering vein of research in the study of objects, has since been enveloped by new methodological approaches, which have the potential to lend new insights to our understandings of books and their social and cultural meanings in Late Imperial China.

Click the More Details button to RSVP or register now(opens in a new tab).

Andrea S. Goldman (郭安瑞) is an associate professor of Chinese history at UCLA. She specializes in the cultural and social history of early modern and modern China, with particular emphasis on the subfields of urban history, performance, the politics of aesthetics, and gender studies.

Her first book, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900, uses opera as a lens through which to observe court and city dynamics in Qing dynasty Beijing. She is currently working on two new book projects: the first is a transnational history of the reconstruction of masculinity in China, ca.1900-1950; the second is a history of gossip in Beijing from roughly 1770-1920.

Goldman teaches the survey of early modern and modern China, ca. 1000-2000 (11B), as well as seminars in early modern and modern Chinese history & historiography, popular culture, gender & sexuality, material culture, and the PRC as history.