Hanchao Lu

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

Hanchao Lu is a professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an honorary senior research professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests include the socioeconomic and cultural history of modern China, Chinese urban history, and everyday life studies.

Lu’s research project at Radcliffe looks at the pattern of state and society relations in the People’s Republic of China through the lens of everyday life in Shanghai during the first 30 years of Communist rule. He aims to address issues related to China’s largest city and beyond: How did ordinary people cope with the extraordinary changes brought by the revolution? To what extent did the city’s old cosmopolitanism survive? Does Shanghai’s stunning resurgence as a global megacity today represent a complete break with the Maoist “dark ages,” or does it have its roots there?

Lu has served as the president of Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) and is currently on the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship panel for social sciences and the humanities. He edits the Chinese Historical Review. Among his recent awards are the CHUS 2010 Honor for Academic Excellence for The Birth of a Republic: Francis Stafford’s Photographs of China’s 1911 Revolution and Beyond (University of Washington Press, 2010) and the Cecil B. Currey Book Award from the Association of Third World Studies for Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars (Stanford University Press, 2005). Lu received his PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.