Qin Shao

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

Qin Shao, a professor of history at The College of New Jersey, has published extensively on topics such as statecraft in the second century BC and China’s urbanization in the early twentieth century. She is particularly interested in institutions of sociability—such as teahouses and museums—as a window to social change. Her book Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890–1930 (Stanford University Press, 2004) shows how the concept and practice of “exhibitory modernity” helped transform a provincial town into a model of progress in central China.

At Radcliffe, Shao will carry her study of urban China into the twenty-first century. Drawing on original fieldwork and using a multidisciplinary approach, this study will examine the human consequences of rapid economic change, often hidden in the shadow of high-rises. It will also explore the broad political, social, and cultural implications, in terms of economic and social justice, grassroots activism, cultural memory, and political legitimacy, that shed light on the nature of the post-Mao transition and China’s political future.

For 2007–2008, Shao was also offered residential fellowships by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience. She is a past recipient of research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, among other organizations. Shao’s education was interrupted after grade school by Mao’s Cultural Revolution: a Shanghai native, she spent six years in the countryside before pursuing her higher education in China and the United States.