I am a specialist in Chinese history interested in a wide range of topics, ranging from the gendered symbolism of revolutions to patterns of student protest, and from the way that globalization affects urban life and popular culture to American images of Asia.  I am fascinated by seeing what light the past can shed on the present, and am committed to finding ways to reach and engage general as well as specialist audiences.  These diverse concerns show through in my teaching and most of them figure in my recent book, China’s Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times (Indiana University Press, 2007).  This is an experimental work, intended for general educated readers as well as specialists.  It is written largely in the first person and is often playful in tone, even when I’m grappling with serious issues, such as American misunderstandings of China and the strategies the Chinese Communist Party uses to keep popular discontent from coalescing into a broad-based mass movement like the one it faced in 1989.

Many of my previous publications took more typical academic forms.  This was true of my first book, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 1991), for example, as well as articles I have contributed to periodicals such as the Journal of Asian Studies, the China Quarterly, Urban History, and, most recently, the Journal of World History and History Workshop Journal (both of which published pieces by me in 2007).  Other scholarly works I have published include several edited volumes: Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (Westview Press, 1992 and 1994 editions), co-edited with political scientist Elizabeth Perry; Human Rights and Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2000), co-edited with French historian Lynn Hunt and diplomatic historian Marilyn B. Young (and now out in an updated and expanded edition, with Latin Americanist Greg Grandin joining us as a fourth co-editor); Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities (University of California Press, 2002), co-edited with anthropologist Susan Brownell; and Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (Routledge, 2003), the only one in the bunch that I edited on my own.

I have also, though, done a lot of work that, like China’s Brave New World, moves toward or crosses the border that separates specialized academic work from other sorts of writing. For example, I have co-written a textbook on the world in the 20th century and serve as one of the editors for the Oxford University Press “Pages from History” series, the goal of which is to produce high quality, document-based books for use in K-12 and introductory college classes. I have worked as a consultant to the talented filmmakers of the Long Bow Group, whose documentary on Tiananmen, “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” was shown on PBS, and whose documentary on the Cultural Revolution, “Morning Sun,” won a prize from the American Historical Association.  And I have written commentaries and reviews for general interest magazines (such as Newsweek’s international edition, the Nation, Foreign Policy, the TLS in London, and so on), newspapers (the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the German edition of the Financial Times, etc.), and websites (Outlook India’s, for instance).

I am currently finishing up work on Global Shanghai, 1850-2010.  This book, under contract with Routledge, is aimed to appeal to general readers as well as academics.  It is not a comprehensive history of the city, but rather an effort to shed light on the similarities and differences between the play of international forces within the metropolis during different periods of the recent past.  It also explores the changing global reputation of Shanghai, a place that has long generated a great deal of international interest, from tourists, investors and filmmakers, among other groups.

I have only recently joined the UCI History Department after spending fifteen years at Indiana University in Bloomington, where in addition to teaching I did various things.  For example, I spent a year as the Acting Editor of the Bloomington-based American Historical Review (an experience I liked a great deal, which is one reason I look forward to starting a term as Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies in July 2008) and served for three years as the Director of IU’s East Asian Studies Center. I am no newcomer to the University of California system, though, since I received my B.A. from UC Santa Cruz (in 1982) and my doctorate from UC Berkeley (in 1989), after a brief stint on the East Coast studying at Harvard (where I got a Master’s degree in 1984).

Professor of History

Department of History
546 Murray Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3275

tel: 949.824.0391
fax: 949.824.2865
email: jwassers@uci.edu


Fields of Interest:

Modern China, Protest, Comparative Gender History, Revolutions, Urban Studies, Globalization