Joanna Waley-Cohen is the Provost for New York University Shanghai and Silver Professor of History at New York University, where she has taught Chinese history since 1992. As Provost, she serves as NYU Shanghai’s chief academic officer, setting the university’s academic strategy and priorities, and overseeing academic appointments, research, and faculty affairs. Her research interests include early modern Chinese history, especially the Qing dynasty; China and the West; and Chinese imperial culture, especially in the Qianlong era; warfare in China and Inner Asia; Chinese culinary history. She has received many honors, including archival and postdoctoral fellowships, including those from the American Council of Learned Societies; Goddard and Presidential Fellowships from NYU; and an Olin Fellowship in Military and Strategic History from Yale.
She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, then took a degree in law. When she moved with her husband to the United States, she could not practice law, and enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Yale University, receiving her degree in 1987 Waley-Cohen's books include The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty ; The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History ; and Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820. Her current scholarly projects include a revised history of imperialism in China, a study of daily life in China c.1800, and a history of culinary culture in early modern China.
Influence and reception
welcomed Sexants in the New York Times as "sensibly organized and engagingly told" but "In the end, I disagreed with much of the thesis of this book, but that is not to say that I disliked it. On the contrary, I probably liked it more for disagreeing with it. Partly because of the boldness of the argument, it is stimulating and refreshing..." Her 2003 article "New Qing History" summarized American revisionist scholarship in history of the Qing dynasty and gave it the name New Qing History which has come into widespread use.
