Cynthia Brokaw is a historian of early modern China. She earned a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 1984. After teaching at Vanderbilt University, the University of Oregon, and the Ohio State University, she settled in 2009 at Brown University, where she is now Professor of History and East Asian Studies. Her first book, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China, examines the social implications of a system of moral calculus widely promoted in the Ming and Qing. She has since turned to study the social history (background behind the Ming/Qing) of the book, focusing on the spread of popular print culture and the expansion of the reading public in the early modern period. Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods, her second book, is a case study of a rural publishing center that played an important role in those developments. At the MPIWG, in Department III, she researched the rise of popular household encyclopedias, texts purporting to instruct common readers in the technologies of daily life and the skills of social interaction.
No current projects were found for this scholar.
