Research Interests
Centering on China's multi-faceted engagement with the outside world, Dr. Wang conducts original research in Chinese, English, French, German, and Japanese. 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: U.S.-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.
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.