Rebecca Wu

Rebecca in glasses and buttoned coat, centered beneath a stone arch, with winter trees in the distance.

Rebecca Wu joined Harvard’s Ph.D. program in History and East Asian Languages in the fall of 2025. She graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in History, magna cum laude (2025). Her senior thesis, which examined petitioning practices in late-Ming China, won the department’s Susan Naquin Prize for the Best Senior Thesis in Asian History.

Rebecca mainly works on the social, institutional, and legal history of late imperial China (1400–1900), with broad interests in political and legal culture, state-society relations, and comparative empires.