Rate My Professor Lisa Tran

Lisa Tran serves as Professor of History and Department Chair in the Department of History at California State University, Fullerton. She holds a B.A. from Pomona College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Tran teaches courses on Chinese history, Asian history, and world history. Her academic career at CSUF has progressed from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor and now to full Professor, during which she has taken on leadership roles such as Program Coordinator for the Asian Studies Program and participation in university-wide assessment committees, including co-chairing the Subcommittee on Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment. She has also been recognized for her teaching contributions, alongside colleagues in the History Department, and served as a faculty ambassador for affordable learning solutions.

Tran's research specializations center on women and the law in China, particularly in twentieth-century contexts, as well as overseas Chinese, global history, and the ethnic Chinese exodus from Vietnam in the late 1970s. She received an ACLS Fellowship in 2011 for her project 'Law and Custom: Concubines in Early Twentieth-Century China,' which explores how legal reforms under various political regimes affected concubinage practices and challenged traditional views attributing concubines' marginalization solely to kinship status, emphasizing instead the role of legal and social definitions in their agency. Key publications include her monograph Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), which details these dynamics across the late Qing, Republican, and early People's Republic eras; 'Sex and Equality in Republican China: The Debate over the Adultery Law' (2009); and 'The Concubine in Republican China: Social Perception' (2009). Additional contributions encompass encyclopedia entries such as 'Concubinage' and co-authored works on disciplinary differences in student learning assessment. Her scholarship has been featured in faculty author recognitions and continues to influence studies on gender, law, and family in modern Chinese history.