Gail B Hershatter

About

Gail Hershatter is a Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and both an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her expertise centers on the history of modern China, with a particular focus on labor history, gender, and sexuality within the Chinese context. Throughout her career, Hershatter has made significant contributions to the understanding of these fields through her scholarly research and publications. She has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards and honors, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2015, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History awarded twice by the American Historical Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Additionally, she served as President of the Association for Asian Studies during 2011-2012 and has been acknowledged for her teaching excellence with the John Dizikes Teaching Award. Hershatter's work has had a profound impact on the study of modern Chinese history, particularly in illuminating the intersections of labor, gender, and memory.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Art
• Media studies
• History
• Geography
• Literature
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Women and China's Revolutions

  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers eBooks · 2018-01-01 · 71 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <JATS1:p>If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911…

  PublisherDOI

• Disquiet in the House of Gender

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2012-11-01 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When I was a child at the height of the Cold War, the press painted China in vivid primary colors—red menace, yellow peril, blue-clad masses. China was a back-burner story, however, compared to the Soviet threat, and my education through high school never touched upon it. A shift in public attention began with the 1971 China visit of the U.S. ping-pong team and Nixon's state visit in February 1972. Suddenly the mainstream U.S. press discovered beggar-free streets, healthy children, acupuncture a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Women and China's Socialist Construction, 1949–78

  Japan focus · 2019-06-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The chapter that follows is excerpted from my book Women and China's Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), which asks: If we place women at the center of our account of China's last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? Women and China's Revolutions takes a close look at the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Building on the research of gender studies sc…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Gender of Memory

  2019-07-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines,…

  PublisherDOI

• Dangerous Pleasures

  2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emily Honig

  35 shared

• Christina Kelley Gilmartin

  26 shared

• Su Lifen

  Brown University

  25 shared

• Hui Jiang

  Sun Yat-sen University

  25 shared

• Zhao Zhengmin

  Brown University

  25 shared

• Zen Li

  Agnes Scott College

  25 shared

• Huang Qingshu

  Brown University

  25 shared

• Yi-Ching Wu

  Harvard University

  25 shared

Awards & honors

• Faculty Research Lecturer (2012-13)
• President, Association for Asian Studies (2011-12)
• Distinguished Professor of History (2008)
• Guggenheim Fellowship award recipient (2007)
• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Fellow…

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