Biography
I am a historian of modern China. I completed my PhD in History at the University of California, Irvine in 2023. I was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at UC Irvine from 2023-2024. In 2025, I began a multiyear research postdoc at the Centre on China in the World at The Australian National University.
Broadly, my research focuses on the reciprocal environmental, social, and political changes during China’s dramatic and uneven industrial development in the twentieth century. I have published on an array of issues, such as the history of China’s former largest copper mining city (Baiyin), social movements of the 1980s, as well as the history of industrial recycling and environmentalism in China.
My book project, “Pollution Revolution: Maoism, Environmentalism, and the Consequences
of Industrialization in Modern China” is a history of the origins and character of environmental concerns in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I show that the PRC was very much a part of the global environmental awakening of the 1960s and 1970s, albeit refracted through the unique political conditions of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The book elaborates how there developed an ambitious Maoist environmentalism in the 1970s that sought to align environmental problems with the Chinese revolution and resolve the “contradiction” between environmental issues and economic production.
Here you can watch me present portions of this research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese
Studies at Harvard University.
Outside the academy, I work with Jeffrey Wasserstrom as co-editor for China-related content at
the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Advisors: Dr. Emily Baum; Dr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Dissertation: Pollution Revolution: Maoist Environmentalism in the Late Cultural Revolution, 1970-1974