Interests

My research and teaching is centered around the social and cultural history of China from the Qing through to the present.  My interests include local history, rural north China, religion and the experience of revolution.  I am also increasingly interested in studying transnational history from a local perspective and in interactions between China, France and Italy.  Both of my most recent projects have been micro-histories and I have made extensive use of fieldwork in China, especially conducting oral history interviews and collecting village-level materials, as well as using more conventional archives and libraries.  I currently have three ongoing research projects.  The first is a microhistory of a Catholic village in Shanxi from its establishment in the late 17th century through to the 20th century.  The second is a study of the interpreters for the first British embassy to China in 1793, a story stretching from Gansu to Naples as well as London and Beijing.  The third is a large-scale study of personal experiences of the communist revolution in China, focusing on the years from 1948 to 1952 when the Communist Party actually took power across the country.  I have taught a seminar on this and am currently working on Chinese reactions to the dropping of the atomic bomb as part of this project..

Selected Publications

• “A Penny for the Little Chinese”: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843-1951.” American Historical Review 113.1 (2008).
• “Narcotics, Nationalism and Class in China: The Transition from Opium to Morphine and Heroin in early 20th Century Shanxi" East Asian History 32/33 (2006/2007).
• The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village 1857-1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
• "Clothing and Power on the Periphery of Empire: The Costumes of the Indigenous People of Taiwan". Positions: East Asian Cultural Critique 11.2 (2003).
• China: Inventing the Nation. London: Arnold, 2001.
• Natives of Formosa: British Reports of the Taiwan Indigenous People. Taipei: Shung Yeh Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2001.
• "Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China, 1890-1919" Past and Present 166 (2000). (Reprinted in Jeffrey Wasserstrom ed., Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches. Routledge, 2002.)
• The Making of the Republican Citizen: Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929. Contemporary China Institute Series, Oxford University Press, 2000.

 

Contact Info

Center for Government and International Studies-South Building

Room S135

1730 Cambridge Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

hharris@fas.harvard.edu

617.495.4064

 

Office Hours: Friday 2:00-4:00

Curriculum Vitae