Faculty Research Fellow
Li Chen, J.D.(Illinois), Ph.D.(Columbia), studies the complex interplay of law, culture, and politics in the context of Chinese and global history since the 1500s. He is the author of Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia, 2016, winner of the Association for Asian Studies’ 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize in the field of China studies), two co-edited volumes, Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice, and Transformation, 1530s-1950s (with Professor Madeleine Zelin, Brill, 2015), and Pathways of Scholarship: Reflective and Methodological Conversations with International Scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences (with Professor Ruoyun Bai, Shangwu yinshuguan, 2023, in Chinese). He has another Chinese book forthcoming, Law, Knowledge, and Power in the Age of Empire (Shangwu yinshuguan, 2024), and expects to complete his second English monograph in 2024, entitled Invisible Power and Imperial Governance: Legal Specialists, Juridical Capital, and Technocracy in Qing China while working on his third monograph on the juridical politics and symbolic implications of capital punishment and royal leniency in late imperial China.
Fellowship Research Project: Capital Punishment, Imperial Justice, and Confucian Rulership: A Cultural History of the Qing Autumn Assizes, 1644-1911
This study will offer an interdisciplinary and innovative study of the mandatory judicial review of thousands of capital cases every year in China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). By utilizing a large body of archival records and variety of other primary sources, this book project will shed new light on the institutional logic, operational dynamics, and underlying ideology as well as structural tensions of the legal and political systems of late imperial China, providing a fresh view of the nature and operation of early modern Chinese law, culture, and politics.