Janet Chen is Professor of History and East Asian Studies, specializing in twentieth-century China.  Her first book, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953 (Princeton University Press, 2012), is a study of the destitute homeless during a time of war and revolution.  A new book project underway, titled “The Sounds of Mandarin: The Making of a National Language in China and Taiwan,” will be a study of how ordinary people learned to speak “Mandarin” at its various stages of historical formation.