Guest Speakers

Rebecca L. Spang is a professor of history at Indiana University. She is a historian of politics, culture, and consumption who has published chiefly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. For much of her career, she has been especially interested in money. Her Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Harvard, 2015) uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation—the assignats (a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”)—to write a new history of money and a new history of the French Revolution. She is currently working on a comparative history of high modern money (c. 1750-1950) organized around the widening gap between theories of money and day-to-day practices.

Kenneth Pomeranz is a University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He previously taught at the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses mostly on China, though he is also very interested in comparative and world history. Most of his research is in social, economic, and environmental history, though he has also worked on state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and other topics. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), which won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the AHA, and shared the World History Association book prize; The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993), which also won the Fairbank Prize; The World that Trade Created (with Steven Topik, first edition 1999, 3rd edition 2012), and a collection of his essays, recently published in France. He has also edited or co-edited five books, and was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Global History. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other sources. His current projects include a history of Chinese political economy from the 17th century to the present, and a book called Why Is China So Big?, which tries to explain, from various perspectives, how and why contemporary China's huge land mass and population have wound up forming a single political unit.

Prof. Mimi Li joined the School of Hotel & Tourism Management at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2007. Prof. Li specializes in tourism and hospitality marketing, tourist behaviour, tourism planning, and issues related to tourism in China. Prof. Li has been an active researcher since she joined the university. She has published in major tourism and hospitality journals including Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research, and International Journal of Hospitality Management. Her recent research interest is children and family tourism.

Richard von Glahn is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His primary field of research is the economic and social history of premodern China, with a particular focus on the period 1000-1700. His publications include four monographs in Chinese history, several edited books, and a co-authored textbook in world history. His research has been supported by a number of awards, including National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships (twice) and a Guggenheim Fellowship.