Professor
Office: AL 532
Phone: (619) 594-6985 
Email: [email protected]
Curriculum vitae

Education

Ph.D. in History, Indiana University, Bloomington (2002)

M.A. in History, Indiana University, Bloomington (1997)

B.A. in History, Wesleyan University (1992)

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley is Professor of Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History.  Her research focuses on cultural and political responses to major disasters in nineteenth and twentieth-century China, while her teaching interests include World History, famine studies, gender and sexuality, comparative responses to trauma and disaster, and recent Sino-Japanese and Sino-US relations. 

Professor Edgerton-Tarpley’s first book, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, examined Confucian constructions of famine during China’s late imperial period. It was published by the University of California Press in 2008, and the Chinese translation of it appeared in China in 2011.  Next, Professor Edgerton-Tarpley conducted extensive archival research on a pair of major disasters that struck Republican-era China in the 1930s and early 1940s, and wrote a series of articles on them. These publications include an article on Yellow River flooding and the Chinese Civil War (Social Science History, 2017), a chapter on the Henan Famine of 1942-43 published in an edited volume titled 1943: China at the Crossroads (Cornell East Asia Series, 2015), and “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China” (Journal of Asian Studies, 2014).  Professor Edgerton-Tarpley then began to research state and local-level responses to the catastrophic Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958-1962.  In 2018 she and her two children spent six months at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, where she conducted Fulbright-supported archival research on the Mao-era famine. Her current NEH-supported book project maps changes and continuities in Chinese responses to calamity. She employs case studies of three major famines that struck the same area, North China’s densely-populated Henan Province, under governments (late-Qing, Nationalist, and Maoist) with markedly different ideological foundations. Professor Edgerton-Tarpley travels to China regularly to conduct research and share her work at disaster studies conferences held in the PRC. Chinese-language versions of several of her publications have been published in China. 

Professor Edgerton-Tarpley offers survey courses on Asian and World history, upper-division courses such as Ancient and Imperial China, China in Revolution, and Women, Sex, and Power in Chinese History, and graduate seminars on key historiographical debates in the modern China and modern World History fields. She enjoys getting students at all levels interested in Asia, working with current and future public school teachers, and exploring historical themes through East Asian films and literature.