Henrietta Harrison

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Henrietta Harrison is a professor of modern Chinese history at Harvard University. Her research concentrates on the social and cultural history of modern China. For the past 10 years, she has worked mainly on the history of the relatively poor, inland province of Shanxi. Her most recent book, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942 (Stanford University Press, 2005), is a biographical study of a traditional Confucian scholar living out his life in a rapidly modernizing world. At Radcliffe, Harrison will be writing a book about the history of a single Chinese Catholic village from its establishment as an entirely Catholic community in the 1700s to the present. The book is structured around a series of folk tales about local history, which are then traced through archival and published sources to produce a history that attempts to be true to local experience and to professional historical debate. The book will rewrite the history of modern China’s encounter with Christianity. Harrison received her PhD in 1996 from the University of Oxford. She has taught at the University of Leeds and held research fellowships at Oxford and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her books include The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford University Press, 2000), China: Inventing the Nation (Hodder Arnold, 2001), and Natives of Formosa: British Reports of the Taiwan Indigenous People, 1650–1950 (Shung Yeh Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2001).