OfficeKathy Le Mons Walker
Modern Chinese History; Comparative History; Third World History
My research and teaching interests include modern Chinese social and economic history; the political economy of the Third World; theories of social change; nondevelopmentalist alternative histories; women and work; comparative women’s history; peasant studies; comparative revolutions; and imperialism. In teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels I stress the training of students who place contemporary analyses in the context of longer-term social, economic, and cultural/political patterns and who use historical materials to develop and elaborate social theory. I likewise stress the importance of critical approaches to social theory and systematic empirical analysis.
Representative Publications:
“Neoliberalism on the Ground in Rural India: Predatory Growth, Agrarian Crisis, Internal Colonization, and the Intensification of Class Struggle,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 35, 4 (October) 2008.
“From Covert to Overt: Everyday Peasant Politics in China and the Implications for Transnational Agrarian Movements,” in Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization, edited by Saturino M. Borras Jr., Marc Edelman, and Christobal Kay. London: Wiley-Blackwell. 2008.
Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999.
“Economic Growth, Peasant Marginalization, and the Sexual Division of Labor in Early Twentieth Century China: Women’s Work in Nantong County,” Modern China, 19, 3 (July) 1993.
Notes:
Professor Walker received the Krishna Bharadwaj Prize, awarded for best article of the year by a returning author, from The Journal of Peasant Studies for her article “Gangster Capitalism and Peasant Politics in China: The Last Twenty Years,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 33, 1 (January) 2006.