Melissa MacAuley
Melissa Macauley (Ph.D., Berkeley, 1993) specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese history. Her research interests include social history and legal culture, the interconnected history of southeast coastal China and Southeast Asia, the dynamics of transnational crime in the context of migration and trade, and the transformation of non-Western law in the age of colonialism and imperialism.
She is completing a book on the entangled history of a region on the southeast coast of China (Chaozhou or Teochew) and the port polities of the South China Sea from the seventeenth century to 1927.
Her first book, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China, was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1999. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, among others.
She also has served as the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at Harvard University, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), and a Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Qing History at Renmin University (Beijing). She was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999 and named a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in 2004.
Source: Northwestern University Department of History
