Rate My Professor Minghui Hu

Minghui Hu is an Associate Professor in the History Department and affiliated faculty member in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004 through the History of Science program. Prior to his doctoral studies, Hu obtained an M.S. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Tamkang University in Taiwan in 1989, where he studied structural engineering with computer-assisted analysis and design. During his time at UCLA, he worked as a computer programmer in a child psychiatrist lab at a UCLA hospital. Following the completion of his dissertation, Hu held an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the History Department at UC Santa Cruz in 2005.

Hu's academic interests include Early Modern China from 1600 to 1900, the history of science and technology, the humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and the rise of China in world politics. He authored the monograph China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen (University of Washington Press, 2015), with a Chinese translation forthcoming in 2023. Hu co-edited Cosmopolitanism in China, 1600-1950 (Cambria Press, 2016) with Johan Elverskog. His scholarly articles have been published in The International History Review, Frontier of History in China, Twentieth-First Century, Xue Heng, and Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. He has completed a book manuscript entitled Waiting for the Barbarians: A History of Geopolitics in Early Modern China (Cambria Press, 2024). Hu's future research emphasizes data mining and the field of digital humanities, in addition to ongoing work on the history of early modern China. He serves as Principal Investigator for the Humanities Institute’s Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Research Cluster at UC Santa Cruz.