Susan L. Mann

Professor Susan L. Mann is a Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Davis. Mann is a leading historian of Chinese women who imaginatively uses a wide variety of sources to describe the affective and aesthetic life of women within the Chinese family. Her first work studied relations between the Chinese merchant class and the local bureaucracy, focusing on mechanisms of tax collection and market regulation. She then moved to reconstruct the hidden lives of Chinese women in the eighteenth century with a unique approach combining literary and historical sources. Her Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (1997), won the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (2007), a fascinating collective biography of the women in a literati family in the lower Yangzi region of China over several centuries, won the Fairbank prize for best book on modern China from the American Historical Association. Mann also coedited Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History (2001) -- the first translation into English of 18 Chinese texts from the mid-ninth century through the late nineteenth century. She is a former president of the Association of Asian Studies. Her most recent book is Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (2011).