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SIPA Faculty
Madeleine Zelin
International Affairs Building, Room 914
Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures
Phone: 212-854-1727
www.columbia.edu/~mhz1/
mhz1@columbia.edu
Biography:
Madeleine Zelin, professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures, specializes in modern Chinese history, particularly in economic and legal history. She is director of the Columbia East Asian National Resource Center and served as director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute from 1992 to 1993 and from 1995 to 2001. In addition to core courses on Chinese history in the graduate and undergraduate programs, Professor Zelin teaches seminars on the history of Chinese economy, its legal tradition, and Chinese social movements.
Her publications include The Magistrate's Tael, Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch'ing China (Berkeley 1984); Rainbow, which she translated (Berkeley 1992); and Contract and Property in Early Modern China, which she edited with Jonathan K. Ocko and Robert Gardella (Stanford 2004). She is presently working on a book to be entitled The Merchants of Zigong. She is also working on an essay collection to be titled The Development of Underdevelopment on the Chinese Frontier and a book with Jonathan Ocko and Zheng Qin to be titled Contract Law and Civil Procedure in Qing and Republican China: A Text-Based Approach.
Professor Zelin received her BA from Cornell University in 1970 and her PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 1979.