EVENTS

                                                                               Special Lecture

13 January 2017

2.30pm – 4.30pm

ICS Conference Hall

Prof. Mark C. Elliott

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Harvard University

Mark Elliott is Vice Provost of International Affairs at Harvard University and the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. An authority on the last four centuries of Chinese history, Elliott’s research encompasses the history of relations between China and its nomadic frontier.

A graduate of Yale (BA 1981 summa cum laude, MA 1984), Elliott earned his PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley and joined the Harvard faculty in 2003. His first book, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China, is a pioneering study in the “New Qing History,” an approach emphasizing the imprint of Inner Asian traditions upon China’s last imperial state. He is also the author of Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World, and has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles in English, French, Chinese, and Japanese. He serves on numerous editorial boards, and was for three years the director of the Fairbank Center of Chinese Studies. Elliott teaches a range of courses on history, historiography, and historical methods, as well as classes in Manchu studies. As Vice Provost, Elliott works to advance international academic initiatives, extending the global reach of Harvard’s research and teaching activities.

Asst. Professor Arunabh Ghosh

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Harvard University

Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests that span the social, economic, and intellectual histories of twentieth century China, transnational histories of science and statecraft, and Sino-Indian history. Trained at Haverford College and at Tsinghua and Columbia universities, Ghosh joined the History Department from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where he was an Academy Scholar for the 2014-15 AY.

Ghosh’s current in-progress book manuscript investigates how the early PRC state built statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers. He has conducted research for this project in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi, and Kolkata, and his work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and Columbia University. Ghosh is additionally interested in applying digital methods, in particular text mining and bibliometric analysis, to the study of the early People’s Republic.  To that end, he has been involved with the Fairbank Center’s Digital China Initiative (DCI) and is also collaborating on a couple of projects with recent An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Paul Vierthaler (now at Boston College). Future research projects include a history of dam construction in twentieth century China and a series of essays on 1950s China-India history.