Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Jacob Eyferth , Ph.D.
Professor in Chinese History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Teaching/Research Interests:
social history of twentieth-century China, in particular of the Chinese countryside; history of work, technology, gender, and everyday life.I am interested in the changing experience of life and work among “ordinary” (i.e. non-elite) people throughout China’s revolutionary twentieth century. Geographically, most of my work has focused on the countryside; in terms of time period, I am particularly interested in the transition to and from socialism, i.e. the 1950-60s and the 1980-90s. My first book, currently under review for publication, is a history/ethnography of a community of rural papermakers in a remote part of Sichuan. It describes the attempt by modernizing states (Qing, warlord, Guomindang, Maoist, and post-socialist) to map and catalogue the know-how of rural producers, to translate their knowledge into writing and to make it accessible to an audience of technocrats and planners – as well as the attempts of local people to resist this change. My second project (still in its early stages) focuses on gender and cloth-making, clothing, and cloth trading in 1950s China. I am particularly interested in how the rapid phasing out of handloom weaving, together with a strict rationing regime for cotton and the mobilization of women for agricultural work, affected the daily lives of rural women.
I teach courses on conflict and resistance in contemporary China, everyday life under socialism, and on sources and methods of PRC history. I am also preparing a course on changing concepts of (material and immaterial) property in twentieth-century China
Publications:
- How China Works: Perspectives on the Twentieth-Century Industrial Workplace (edited volume, Routledge 2006)
- Rural Development in Transitional China (co-edited with Peter Ho and Eduard Vermeer, Frank Cass 2004)
- “De-Industrialization in the Chinese Countryside: Handicrafts and Development in Jiajiang (Sichuan), 1935-1978,” China Quarterly 173, March 2003.
- Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots (book manuscript under review)
