The Professors

About Kenneth L. Pomeranz (in 2020)

Kenneth Pomeranz is a University Professor of History and in the College; 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 seventeenth 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.

 

About R. Bin Wong (in 2020)

R. Bin Wong is Distinguished Professor of History and was Director of the Asia Institute at UCLA from 2004 through 2016. His research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns, as part of the larger scholarly efforts underway to make world history speak to contemporary conditions of globalization. He is author or editor of several books, including China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997) and Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (2011), along with more than ninety articles published in North America, East Asia and Europe. Since 2009 he has been a Distinguished Guest Professor at the Fudan University Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences. He also serves on the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and on the Berggruen Institute on Philosophy and Culture Academic Board.