HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Government Scholar Perry To Join FAS

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Elizabeth Perry, an expert on the political order of China from the mid-19th century to the present, with emphasis on the era's rebellions, revolutions, labor strikes, and other disturbances, has been appointed professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Perry, currently the Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, will begin her appointment July 1.

Perry said that her decision to move to Cambridge was based on her attraction to Harvard's "lively and growing community of East Asianists as well as its outstanding Government Department."

Other factors were the opportunities for graduate-level teaching as well as the University's scholarly facilities.

"One of the most important things to me is the training of graduate students in the field of Chinese politics," she said, "and Harvard seems like an ideal setting in which to accomplish that goal. It has excellent libraries, generous fellowship support, and engaged faculty who represent a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives."

Known for her historical and ethnographic approach to the study of Chinese politics, Perry has impressed her colleagues with the original and comprehensive nature of her scholarship.

Department chairman Kenneth Shepsle said that Perry "is someone who joins the detailed expertise and nuanced understandings of the China specialist with the social science instincts of the student of comparative politics."

Roderick MacFarquhar, the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science, said that scholars in Harvard's Government Department as well as other East Asianists "are excited and delighted that we've been able to persuade Elizabeth Perry to come. She is a very gifted scholar who makes enormously good use of both documentary sources and access to individuals in her studies of Chinese politics on the grassroots level. She is clearly seen as the outstanding figure in her age cohort."

Perry was born in China in 1948. Her parents were Episcopal missionaries teaching at St. John's University in Shanghai. When the Communists took over in 1949, the family was forced to leave. They went to Japan, where Perry spent her childhood.

Perry earned a bachelor's degree in 1969 from William Smith College in Geneva, N.Y., and a master's in political science from the University of Washington in 1971. In 1979, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1978 and a year later took part in the first national academic exchange between the U.S. and China after relations were normalized in 1979. She spent the 1979-80 year at Nanjing University as a visiting scholar conducting research on mid-19th century peasant uprisings.

Back at the University of Washington, Perry became an associate professor in 1982 and a full professor in 1986. In 1990, she joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. She was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1982-83 and at National Taiwan University in 1990-91.

Perry has written numerous articles in both English and Chinese which have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly journals, journals of contemporary politics, and edited volumes.

Her books include Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 (Stanford University Press, 1980); The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, co-edited with Christine Wong (Harvard University Press, 1985); Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Learning from 1989, co-edited with Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Westview Press, 1991); Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford University Press, 1993); and Putting Class in its Place: Bases of Worker Identity in East Asia, edited with an introduction (University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, forthcoming).

Shanghai on Strike was the winner of both the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in East Asian history and the International Labor History Association "Book of the Year" award.