Mara Yue Du

Research Interest
Early Modern and Modern China; China-Southeast Asia Relations; US-China Relations; Gender; Law.

Dr Du teaches modern Chinese history at Cornell University, USA, with a focus on China’s international relations and the connections between China’s past and its present.

On-going Research Projects:
China: From a Nationless State to a Nation Defined by State (under contract with Columbia University Press).
Beyond the Inner Asia-China Divide: Steppe and Sown in the Making of China (collaborative volume, in progress).
Beyond the Sino-Western Divide: Land and Sea in the Making of Chinese-ness (collaborative volume, in progress).
Twice a Stranger: China, United States, and Trans-Pacific Travelers (book project in progress).
Social Darwinism in Asia: A History (book project in progress)

 

Selected Publications

Books:
State and Family in China: Filial Piety and Its Modern Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
China: From a Nationless State to a Nation Defined by State (under contract, Columbia University Press)

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

“Toward a Nation Defined by State: Tattooed Loyalty and the Evolution of Yue Fei’s (1103-1142) Image from the Song to the Present,” Journal of Chinese History, 8.1 (2024), 23-48.

“Unlimited Debt toward Father and Mother: Engendering State-Sponsored Generational Hierarchies in Late Imperial China,” Asia Major, 34.2 (2021), pp.93-125.

“From Dynastic State to Imperial Nation: International Law, Diplomacy, and Conceptual Decentralization of China, 1860s-1900s,” Late Imperial China, 42.1 (2021), pp.177-220.

“Bringing Chinese Law in Line with Western Standards? Problematizing ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ in the Late Qing Debate over the New Criminal Code,” Frontiers of History in China, 16.1 (2021), pp.39-72.

“Policies and Counterstrategies: State-Sponsored Filiality and False Accusation in Qing China,” International Journal of Asian Studies, 16.2 (2019), pp.79-97.

“Reforming Social Customs through Law: Dynamics and Discrepancies in the Nationalist Reform of the Adoptive Daughter-in-Law,” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in China 21.1 (2019), pp.76-106.

“Sun Yat-sen as Guofu: Competition over Nationalist Party Orthodoxy in the Second Sino-Japanese War,” Modern China 45.2 (2019), pp.201-235.

“Concubinage and Motherhood in Qing China (1644-1911): Ritual, Law, and Custodial Rights of Property,” Journal of Family History 42.2 (2017), pp.162-183.

“Legal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Mongolia: Gender, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Manchu-Mongol Marriage Alliance,” Late Imperial China 37.2 (2016), pp.1-40.