Rate My Professor Joanna Waley-Cohen

Her research specializes in early modern Chinese history, focusing on Chinese global connections, military and political culture, legal history, and gastronomy in the Qing dynasty. She is the author of The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (I.B. Tauris, 2006), The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (W.W. Norton, 1999), and Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820 (Yale University Press, 1991). Notable articles include “On the Militarization of Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Empire” (Common Knowledge, 2006), “China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century” (American Historical Review, 1993), and “The New Qing History” (Radical History Review, 2004). Current projects encompass culinary culture in early modern China and daily life in premodern China. Waley-Cohen has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, NYU Goddard and Presidential Fellowships, Yale’s Olin Fellowship in Military and Strategic History, the Silver Magnolia Award (2015), and the Chinese Government Friendship Award (2024). She holds an Honorary Professorship at East China Normal University.