Bryna Goodman

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Bryna Goodman is a professor of history at the University of Oregon. She is interested in modern Chinese urban culture, especially gender, colonialism, and new disciplinary formations. Her recent work examines early-20th-century Chinese print culture to map the interplay between everyday life and globally circulating institutions and categories of knowledge.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Goodman will examine the 1921 Shanghai exchange bubble for a book tentatively titled “Economics and the New Chinese Republic: Sovereignty, Capitalism, and Freedom,” looking at elite and vernacular understandings of economics, nationalism, and culture at a formative moment for liberal economic theory in China. Using interdisciplinary source materials—including exchange laws, legal cases, reportage, advertisements, fiction, archives, and the writings of early Chinese economists—the project will illuminate the translation of finance capitalism into Chinese culture and society.

Goodman received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MA and PhD from Stanford University. She has been awarded fellowships from ACLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Oregon Humanities Center and visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Institut d’Asie Orientale (Lyon), and Academia Sinica (Taipei). She is the author of Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (University of California Press, 1995) and a coeditor of Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) and Twentieth-century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World (Routledge, 2012).