Rate My Professor Max Oidtmann

Prof. Dr. Max Oidtmann holds the Chair of Sinology and serves as Professor of Chinese and Central Asian History at the Institute of Sinology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), since January 2022. Prior to this appointment, he was Associate Professor of Asian History at Georgetown University in Qatar from 2019 to 2021 and Assistant Professor there from 2013 to 2019. Oidtmann received his Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2014, with a dissertation entitled “Between Patron and Priest: Amdo Tibet Under Qing Rule, 1791-1911,” supervised by Professor Mark C. Elliott. He also earned an M.A. in Regional Studies–East Asia from Harvard University in 2007, for which he was awarded the Joseph Fletcher Memorial Prize, and a B.A. cum laude in History with a concentration in East Asian Studies from Carleton College in 2001.

Oidtmann is a historian of late imperial China from roughly the 1400s through the early 20th century, focusing on interactions between China-based states such as the Ming and Qing empires and neighboring societies, governance of diverse populations including Tibetans, Mongols, and Muslims, and the relationship between Tibetan Buddhist elites and the Qing government, alongside local religious and legal cultures in borderlands like Gansu and Qinghai provinces. His major monograph, Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2018), explores Qing sovereignty, faith, and law in Tibetan regions using Manchu and Tibetan sources and received the E. Gene Smith Inner Asian Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2020. Key articles include “Overlapping Empires: Religion, Politics, and Ethnicity in 19th Century Qinghai” (Late Imperial China, 2016), “A ‘Dog-eat-dog’ World: Qing Jurispractices and the Legal Inscription of Piety in Amdo” (Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, 2016), and “Imperial Legacies and Revolutionary Legends: The Sibe Cavalry Company, the Eastern Turkestan Republic, and Historical Memories in Xinjiang” (Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies, 2014). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese History (Cambridge University Press) since 2022 and has presented invited lectures at institutions including Academia Sinica, Oxford University, and the University of Würzburg. Oidtmann has held fellowships such as the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (2010), Harvard Fairbank Center Summer Research Grant (2012), and Qatar Foundation Faculty Research Grants (2014-2020). At LMU, he teaches courses on the history of China and Central Asia, training students to analyze primary sources in Chinese, Manchu, and Tibetan.