IEAS Director
Wen-hsin Yeh
Wen-hsin Yeh, Director
Wen-hsin Yeh is Walter and Elise Haas Chair Professor in Asian Studies and Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair in History. She is also an Honorary Professor of History at Peking University. She has served as Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies since January 2007.
A leading authority on 20th century Chinese history, Yeh is author or editor of eleven books and numerous articles examining aspects of Republican history, Chinese modernity, the origins of communism and related subjects. Her books include the Berkeley Prize-winning Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (University of California Press, 1996) and The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (Harvard University, 1990). Her most recent publication, Shanghai Splendor (University of California Press, 2007) is an urban history of Shanghai that considers the nature of Chinese capitalism and middle-class society in a century of contestation between colonial power and nationalistic mobilization.
Professor Yeh served as the Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies from 1994 to 2000 and was Director of the IEAS Shorenstein Programs on Contemporary East Asia from 1996 to 1998. She is a member of the Association for Asian Studies, the American Historical Association, and has served on the Board of Commissioners at the San Francisco Asian Art museum, among other positions. Her work has been supported by numerous prestigious extramural and UC awards, including an ACLS Senior Scholar Fellowship, a Freeman Foundation grant, a multi-year Chiang Ching-kuo Senior Scholar Research Fellowship, as well as the UC President's Humanities Research Fellowship. In 2007 Professor Yeh succeeded T.J. Pempel as the fourth director of the Institute since its establishment in 1978. Former directors are Professor Emeritus Robert Scalapino, Professor of Political Science and Robson Professor of Government; the late Frederic Wakeman, Professor of History and Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Asian Studies; as well as Pempel, Professor of Political Science at Berkeley, and formerly the Boeing Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington.