Historian Dong Wang: A Biography
Historian Dong Wang
A naturalized American citizen with bases in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Lower Rhine of Germany —born in Luoyang, capital of thirteen Chinese dynasties—Dr. Wang left home on her first train ride at the age of sixteen to pursue a B.A. in history at Shandong University in the early-late 1980s.
Since 2007, with two Ph.D.s from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1993) and the University of Kansas (1998) under the aegis of the Pew Charitable Trusts, she has worked at the level of full professor in the United States (Gordon College on the North Shore of Boston, Mass.), Europe (Finland/Germany), and P. R. China (Hong Kong 2001-2002/Shanghai University 2016-2022).
A director of a 2014–15 U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities program, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an elected fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and a research associate at the Fairbank Center of Harvard University since 2002, Dr. Wang currently serves on the editorial board of the Association for Asian Studies (U.S.), American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature (U.S.), The Journal of American-East Asian Relations (the Netherlands), China Information (Britain), Twentieth-Century China (U.S.), The Journal of Current Chinese Affairs (Germany), and Zongjiao yu Meiguo shehui (Religion and American Society, Fudan University). She was also the president of the U.S.-based Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China, 2014-2016.
On average, each year she peer-reviews about 60 articles and book manuscripts mostly in English, serving more than 30 academic journals and publishers. She also provides counsel to the major news media including Australian Broadcast Corporation, South China Morning Post, BBC Radio 4 (e. g. The Deal), the Washington Post, and Weekendavisen (Denmark, Europe’s oldest newspaper in print).
Centering her research and teaching on geopolitics, geoculture, Asia, and especially China’s multifaceted engagement with the outside world, Dr. Wang conducts original research in Chinese, English, French, German, and Japanese while learning Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Her bestselling book, The United States and China: A History from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013, 2021 second edition), has won the "Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2013: Top 25 Book" award (out of nearly 7,000 books and across 54 fields) in the United States.
Other acclaimed books that she single-authored include China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (2005), Managing God's Higher Learning: U.S.-China Cultural Encounter and Canton Christian College (Lingnan University), 1888-1952 (2007), Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and Tse Tsan Tai (1872-1938): An Australian-Cantonese Opinion Maker in British Hong Kong (2023).
She edited Chapter 6 (300 pages): "The United States, Asia, and the Indo-Pacific, 1815-1919," in Alan McPherson, ed., The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Guide: An Annotated Bibliography of American Foreign Relations since 1600, Brill, 2022 (over 2,300 pages), Christianity as an Issue in the History of United States-China Relations (a special volume of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 13, 2008) and Restructuring Governance in Contemporary Urban China: Perspectives on State and Society (the Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 20, no. 72, November 2011). Spies in British Controlled Singapore: Policing the Japanese, 1921-1941, a new book in her edited course reading collection in Asian Studies at Lived Places Publisher in New York, authored by Dr. Edward Drea (a prominent military historian), is scheduled for release in early 2023.
Dr. Dong Wang’s one-hour podcast interview with Dr. John Fitzgerald (Swinburne University in Australia, former Ford Foundation Representative in Beijing) was released on July 20, 2022, about his new book, Cadre Country: How China Became the Chinese Communist Party (Newsouth Books, 2022).
Research Interests
Centering on geopolitics, geoculture, and China's multifaceted engagement with the outside world, Dr. Wang conducts original research in Chinese, English, French, German, and Japanese while studying Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Her book, The United States and China: A History from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), has won the "Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2013: Top 25 Book" award (out of nearly 7,000 books and across 54 fields) in the United States.
Other acclaimed books that she single-authored include China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) and Managing God's Higher Learning: US-China Cultural Encounter and Canton Christian College (Lingnan University), 1888-1952 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
She edited Christianity as an Issue in the History of United States-China Relations (a special volume of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 13, 2008), as well as Restructuring Governance in Contemporary Urban China: Perspectives on State and Society (the Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 20, no. 72, November 2011), and Chapter 6 (300 pages), "The United States, Asia, and the Pacific, 1815–1919," in The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Guide: An Annotated Bibliography of American Foreign Relations since 1600, Brill, 2017, 2022.
Her latest work includes: “Already Post-Modern: Buddhist Stone Images in Luoyang and the Question of Sinicization,” in Richard Madsen (University of California at San Diego), ed. The Sinizication of Chinese Religions: from Above and Below (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 86-129; a review of Jane Hunter, ed., Christianity, Gender, and the Language of the World, Leiden: The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 24 (2017): 305-401, H-Diplo Forum, no. 910, December 12, 2019; “The 1949 Divide: A Revisit” appeared in Oxford UP’s Diplomatic History 43, no. 2 (April 2019): 394-96; "Between Tribute and Unequal Treaties: How China Saw the Sea World in the Early Nineteenth Century," History: The Journal of the Historical Association (U.K.) 103, no. 355 (April 2018): 262-85; "US-China Economic Relations," in Andrew Tan, ed., A Handbook of US-China Relations (Surrey, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016, pp. 155-177); "The Unequal Treaties and the Treaty Ports," in Tim Wright, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, and "The 'Letter Should Not Beg': Chinese Diaspora and Philanthropy in Higher Education," in John Fitzgerald and Hon-ming Yip, eds., Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850-1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020), pp. 99-120.
Her new single-authored book in English, Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China, was released in early 2020 by Rowman & Littlefield in Lanham, Md., in the United States.