Rate My Professor Beverly Bossler

Bossler is a historian of China during the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties (9th–14th centuries), with research centering on family and kinship relations, gender, and patronage networks in social, political, and intellectual contexts. Her major publications include Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279) (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1998), which analyzes kinship and state interactions; Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000–1400 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), exploring shifts in gender ideals; and the edited volume Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters (University of Washington Press, 2015). She has published numerous articles and chapters, such as “Yao Mian’s letters: the epistolary networks of a late Song literatus” (2021) and “Sexuality, Status, and the Female Dancer” (2020). Her scholarship has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2000), American Council of Learned Societies–Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (1995), and multiple University of California President’s Fellowships in the Humanities (1995–96, 2003–04), along with residencies at Fudan University, Dongwu University, and Osaka University. At Brown, she teaches courses including Tang-Song history, gender relations in imperial China, and East Asian history.