Benjamin Elman
University of California, Los Angeles · History
Active 1975–2023
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
About
Benjamin Elman is a Professor Emeritus at UCLA in the Department of History. His research focuses on late imperial and modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history from 1000 to 1930, including the history of education in China from 1600 to 1900 and the history of science in imperial and modern China. His notable publications include 'From Philosophy To Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China,' 'Classical Historiography for Chinese History: Bibliography and Exercises,' and 'A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China.' Elman holds a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, earned in 1980, and has contributed significantly to the understanding of Chinese history through his scholarly work.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- World Wide Web
- Computer network
Selected publications
The Cambridge History of China
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2016-04-04 · 26 citations
bookVolume 9, Part 2 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes which together explore the political, social and economic developments of the Ch'ing Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prior to the arrival of Western military power. Across fifteen chapters, a team of leading historians explore how the eighteenth century's greatest contiguous empire in terms of geographical size, population, wealth, cultural production, political order and mili…
10. Early Modern or Late Imperial? The Crisis of Classical Philology in Eighteenth- Century China
Harvard University Press eBooks · 2015-02-02 · 14 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingWhat China and India once were : the pasts that may shape the global future
2018-01-01 · 12 citations
bookSenior authorPreface Maps Introduction, by Benjamin Elman and Sheldon Pollock Part I 1. Life and Energy, by Kenneth Pomeranz and Sumit Guha 2. Conquest, Rulership, and the State, by Pamela Crossley and Richard M. Eaton 3. Gender Systems: The Exotic Asian and Other Fallacies, by Beverly Bossler and Ruby Lal Part II 4. Relating the Past: Writing (and Rewriting) History, by Cynthia Brokaw and Allison Busch 5. Sorting Out Babel: Literature and Its Changing Languages, by Stephen Owen and Sheldon Pollock Part III…
The Hsueh-hai T’ang and the Rise of New Text Scholarship in Canton
Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2016-04-14 · 4 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingOptical and Cognitive Illusions: The MIT Visualizing Cultures Controversy in Spring 2006
positions asia critique · 2015-02-01 · 3 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingThe “rise of China” narrative in the twenty-first century is replacing the long-standing “rise of Japan” story line of the twentieth century. This article examines the role of wars in redirecting public opinion and, in particular, the effect of the 1894–95 war in refracting Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) reforms since the 1860s into “failures” and contemporary Meiji (1868–1912) reforms into “successes.” To grasp this dramatic reversal, we need new interpretations of the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War that…
Frequent coauthors
- 30 shared
Susan Naquin
- 29 shared
Hui-Yu Ts'ai
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
- 29 shared
Yu–Ju Lin
Taipei Medical University
- 29 shared
Janet Chen
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
- 29 shared
Xiaolan Zhou
Fudan University
- 29 shared
Wu Mi-Cha
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
- 29 shared
Yi-Wen Chan
The University of Tokyo
- 29 shared
Eka Suzuki
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
Labs
Education
- 1985
Ph.D., History
University of California, Berkeley
- 1980
M.A., History
University of California, Berkeley
- 1977
B.A., History
University of California, Berkeley
Awards & honors
- Berkeley Prize in 1991
Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Benjamin Elman
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup