Site Map | SDSU Home

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley (Indiana University Ph.D., 2002) is an Associate Professor of Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History. Her research and teaching interests include East Asian history, world history, famine studies, cultural, social, and gender history, comparative responses to trauma and disaster, and recent Sino-Japanese and Sino-US relations. She travels to China regularly for her research, and has conducted archival research in Taiwan, England, and Ireland as well. Her first book, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, was published by the University of California Press in the spring of 2008. Other recent publications include "Family and Gender in Famine" in the Journal of Women's History (2004) and "The Feminization of Famine, the Feminization of Nationalism: Famine and Social Activism in Treaty-Port Shanghai" in Social History (2005). She is currently beginning a new comparative project on the social history of key disasters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China.. Professor Edgerton-Tarpley offers survey courses on Asian and World history and seminars on Hotspots of Modern Chinese History, China in Revolution, Japan in the Modern World, and Trauma and Memory in Modern East Asian History. In her courses she enjoys exploring historical themes through foreign films and literature.