Madeleine Zelin
Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies, Columbia University
Madeleine Zelin (University of
California at Berkeley Ph.D. 1979) is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies
and director of the East Asian National Resource Center at Columbia University.
She served as director of the Weatherhead
East Asian Institute in 1992-93 and from 1995-2001. She teaches modern Chinese
history as well as a variety of courses focusing on Chinese legal history and
China's early modern social and economic transformation.
Professor Zelin's
research has taken her to archives and cities throughout China, where she has
explored China’s historical process of state-building, elite formation,
business organization and investment, and the development of early modern
customary and statutory law governing private transactions. In addition to her
numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of
The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing
Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch'ing China (1984), the English
translator of Mao Dun’s
Rainbow (1992) and co-editor and author of
Contract
and Property Rights in Early Modern China (2003).
Her most recent book,
The Merchants
Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (2005) was
awarded the Alan Sharlin Memorial Prize of the Social Science History Association,
the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and the
Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS).
She is currently working on a book on the
cultural, political and economic forces that shaped China’s early twentieth
century civil law reforms.
