Wensheng Wang

Accepting new graduate students? Depends; contact me to discuss

Background

Professor Wang is a historian of late imperial China whose research encompasses three main interrelated areas. First, he examines Qing politics, society, and culture leading up to the First Opium War (1839-1842), addressing topics such as empire building, social protest, cultural politics, popular religion, maritime affairs, foreign relations, ecological change, gender, and sexuality. Second, he investigates Sino-Western exchanges, focusing on China’s interactions with Jesuit science and religion from the late Ming through the late Qing dynasty. Third, he employs an interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to Chinese history, promoting dialogue between historians and social scientists to encourage synergies between their research methods and agendas.

Professor Wang is currently working on two book projects: one examines the Ming-Qing encounter with Jesuit mathematics and astronomy, and the other explores the transformative power of Confucian ideology and its complex relationship with the Qing state in the half-century before the First Opium War. With a broad interest in world history, he is committed to contextualizing China within regional and global frameworks through comparative studies and by exploring the empire’s connections with other parts of the world.

Course Offerings

• HIST 151: World History to 1500
• HIST 152: World History since 1500
• HIST 241: Civilizations of Asia
• HIST 309: East Asian Civilizations
• HIST 411: Society and Culture in Traditional China
• HIST 419: The Search for Modern China
• HIST 421: China in World History
• HIST 609: Graduate Reading Seminar on Topics in World History
• HIST 610: Graduate Research Seminar on Topics in World History
• HIST 661C: Graduate Seminar on Late Imperial China

Representative Publications

Books

• White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Edited Volume

• (In Chinese) The Approaches and Practices of Global History, co-edited with Jiguo Xia and Xianbing Du, Beijing: Commercial Press, 2025 (全球史研究指南:方法与实践; 与夏继果，杜宪兵合编，商务印书馆，2025).

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

• "Challenges and Recalibration: Ecological Governance and State Building in Late Qing China." Modern Asian Studies (2026): 1-42.
• "The Legal Discourse of Male-Male Sexuality in Early and Mid-Qing China." American Review of China Studies 27, no. 1 (2026).
• “The Value and Prospect of the Needham Question: A Historiographical Reflection and Elaboration.” Journal of World History 35, no. 1 (2024): 119-161.
• "Science, Religion and Sino-Western Exchanges: Literati-Jesuit Translation of Euclidean Geometry and Its Reception from Late Ming to Mid-Qing." Journal of Chinese History 8, no. 1 (2024): 115-145.
• “State Making, Political Sustainability, and Critical Crisis: A Historical and Theoretical Perspective from Qing China.” International Journal of Asian Studies 20, no. 2 (2023): 793-811.
• “Sino-Vietnamese Pirates and British Invaders: Maritime Crises, Oceanic Governance and Sovereignty in Mid-Qing China.” Review of Culture 60 (2019): 46-65
• “The Mid-Qing Construction of the South China Sea,” World History Connected 14, no.2 (2017).
• “Towards An Integrated Understanding of Critical Upheavals: From Crisis, to Contentious Politics, to All-encompassing Contentious Crisis,” Journal of Historical Sociology 30, no.4 (2017): 746-767.
• “Parallels and Connections: Consumption, Environment, and State Formation at Both Ends of Eurasia, 1500-1900AD,” World History Studies 2 (2015): 102-122.
• “Prosperity and Its Discontents: Contextualizing the Social Protest during the late Qianlong Reign,” Frontier of History in China 6 (2011): 347-369.

Peer-Reviewed Chapters in Edited Volumes

• “Diplomatic Encounters between Qing China and the West.” In Unconquered States: Non-European Powers in the Imperial Age, edited by H. E. Chehabi and David Motadel, 227-245. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• (In Chinese) Co-authored with Jiguo Xia and Xianbing Du. "Introduction: The Approaches to Global History Research." In The Approaches and Practices of Global History (夏继果, “导论：全球史研究：互动、比较、建构.)
• “Social Crises and Political Reform during the Jiaqing Reign of Qing China, 1796-1810s.” In From Early Tang Court Debates to China’s Peaceful Rise, edited by Friederike Assandri and Dora Martins, 33-52. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.