New Report: China Studies in North America

ACLS is pleased to release a new report, “China Studies in North America.”

The Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies has played a vital role in nurturing the field by providing research support to hundreds of scholars. In 2020 ACLS convened a China Studies Advisory Group to identify issues, survey scholars, and make recommendations.

This report summarizes the Group’s findings and reflections, with a focus on the specific challenges involved in the production of new knowledge on China and on the obstacles faced by the emerging generation of PhDs. The findings draw on information collected through two online surveys conducted in Winter 2021 with China scholars with advanced degrees and expertise: one to faculty who have supervised PhD dissertations at institutions of higher education in North America; and the second to PhDs who had applied to the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies Early Career Fellowships Program over its eight competitions 2012-13 to 2019-20.

“Great progress has been made by China studies since the 1980s, particularly thanks to the dramatic increase in numbers of women and scholars of Chinese origin,” said Joy Connolly in her introduction to the report findings. “Today the field literally does not look the same as it did fifty years ago. The horizon of topics of study and methods has broadened, and cooperation with scholars in China has been raised to a higher and more productive level.”

Members of the Advisory Committee

Keisha Brown, History, Tennessee State University
Dorothy Ko, History, Columbia University
Yingyi Ma, Public Affairs and Sociology, Syracuse University
Michael Szonyi, History, Harvard University
Wang Feng, Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Paola Zamperini, Literature and Culture, Northwestern University

The research was conducted, and the study report was prepared, by Wang Feng, Yingyi Ma, and Langou Lian
(University of California, Irvine). The report was edited by Andrzej W. Tymowski, ACLS.