Professor EmeritusHelen Dunstan

I am a historian of premodern China, with a primary focus on economic thought and economic policy in the first half of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). I am particularly interested in the processes through which the central government made economic-policy decisions, and in the interplay between motives of very different kinds in such decision-making. While much of my research to date has focused on state intervention in the grain trade, my interests have now shifted to (1) provincial finance in the Qianlong reign; and (2) problems of interpretation in the sociocultural history of late-imperial and modern China.

Other topics on which I have worked include the southwest-Shanxi salt industry, particularly in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Chinese environmental history, post-1980 Chinese reportage, and eighteenth-century autobiographical texts. I enjoy teaching East Asian gender history, and have always been fascinated by the anthropological study of Chinese society.