Peter C. Perdue

Peter C. Perdue has over thirty years of experience teaching undergraduates about Asian history, at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. He has also lectured to general audiences in Europe, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and many places in the USA. He has taught surveys of East Asia, modern China, environmental and frontier history, and visual history, along with specialized seminars on Chinese documents, and comparative and global history. His...See more

Peter C. Perdue has over thirty years of experience teaching undergraduates about Asian history, at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. He has also lectured to general audiences in Europe, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and many places in the USA. He has taught surveys of East Asia, modern China, environmental and frontier history, and visual history, along with specialized seminars on Chinese documents, and comparative and global history. His prize-winning book, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, examined the expansion of the Chinese empire into Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet over the two centuries from 1600 to 1800. Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 described environmental change over the long term in one province of imperial China. The materials he prepared for the website on the Canton trade (visualizingcultures.mit.edu) won the Franklin Buchanan award for curricular development from the Association of Asian Studies. He has published many articles and conference volumes on comparative empires and frontier history, and has collaborated with engineers, natural scientists, anthropologists and economists in several research projects. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Visiting Professor at People's University, Beijing, and Fudan University, Shanghai. See less