Education

PhD, Columbia University, 2001

Fields of Interest

Modern China; social, cultural, and political history; religion, nationalism, and modernity; spatial history; ritual studies

Academic Profile

Professor Nedostup's research interests include the relationship between mass politics, popular culture, and social power in the twentieth century; religion and the nation-state; and urban and spatial history. Her 2009 monograph Superstitious Regimes examines the execution of Nationalist government campaigns against Chinese popular religious practice, 1927-1937. Her new research investigates community formation and home building among displaced persons in wartime and postwar China and Taiwan.

Professor Nedostup offers courses in Asian and world history; modern Chinese history; and the urban, religious, and cultural history of greater China, as well as teaching graduate colloquia on modernity, religion, and nationalism and on ritual and spatial studies in history. She is director of the Asian Studies Program at Boston College and co-organizes the Modern Chinese History Seminar at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

Representative Publications

• Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Harvard Asia Center, 2009)
• “Ritual Competition and the Modernizing Nation-State,” in Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (University of California Press, forthcoming 2008)
• “Two Tombs: Thoughts on Zhu Yuanzhang, the Kuomintang, and the Meanings of National Heroes," in Sarah K. Schneewind, ed., Long Live the Emperor!: The Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History (Society for Ming Studies, 2008)
• “Civic Faith and Hybrid Ritual in Nationalist China,” in Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart, ed., Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 27-56
• The China Gateway — a resource site for students of Chinese history
• "Begging the Sages of the Party-State: Citizenship and Government in Transition in Nationalist China, 1927-37," with Liang Hong-ming, International Review of Social History, 2001 Supplement (also published as Lex Heerma van Voss, ed., Petitions in Social History [2002])