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If you are curious, 王 (Wáng) is the surname I inherit from my father, and you are likely to encounter a "王" for every 14 Chinese you meet.
悠 (Yōu) is the "first" name given by my mother; it literally means "longing" and "long," with the latter implication often used to modify history.
[photo description: Wáng Yōu, with short black hair and in a grey sweater, smiles into the camera.]
Assistant Professor of History
Georgetown University, since 2025
Education
Ph.D. in History, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 2022
Graduate Certificate in Writing Pedagogy
Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities
A.M. in Social Sciences, the University of Chicago, 2014
B.Econ. in Finance and Banking, Zhejiang University, 2012
International Exchange Program at Korea University, 2009-2010
Research Interests
Late Imperial and Modern China; Environmental History; History of Technology; Social and Economic History; Women and Masculinities; Digital Humanities
Teaching Interests
Early Modern Globalization; Infrastructure and Technology; Gender and Sexuality; Confucianism; Everyday Experiences; Rural Governance; Work and Labor; Food; Knowledge Production
[photo description: Wáng Yōu, looking downward, weeds in a flooded rice paddy; she is in a blue and white dress (which is inappropriate for the task).]
News!
February 2025 Together two other wonderful scholars in the field, I am invited by the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i for a talk on Chinese environmental history. Our panel, "Water, Land, and Crops: Agricultures in China's Core and Peripheries (17th - 20th Centuries)," examines agricultural production in China’s core and peripheries, as well as the underlying environmental conditions, resource management strategies, and economic imperatives. My part explores the Lower Yangzi Delta, a “world of water,” and unravels how rural communities sustained their water resources through self-organized hydraulic institutions and under minimal state intervention.
June 2024 My article "Women Till and Women Weave: Rice, Cotton, and the Gendered Division of Labor in Jiangnan" comes out in Late Imperial China. It re-visits the heatedly debated question of women's work and gender(ed) division of labor in rural China by both introducing a new sort of evidence—the 650,000+ criminal cases stored in the First Historical Archives of China (aka xingke tiben), among which I utilize 891 cases from China's coastal economic center (Jiangnan) between 1722 and 1850—and highlighting the entanglement between the technical systems of rice and cotton (the major commercial crops of the region), labor market, and gendered narratives.
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