Xue Zhang

Xue Zhang specializes in the political and cultural history of early modern/late imperial China (1368-1911). Her dissertation entitled “From the Western Regions to New Dominion: Geographical Knowledge of Xinjiang in Qing China, 1759-1881” examines the formation of the Qing’s geographical knowledge of Xinjiang and how the body of knowledge contributed to its reconquest of Xinjiang and the establishment of Xinjiang as a province in the 1870s and 80s. She has also begun researching her second project, whose working title is “Clerks and Paperwork: The Grand Secretariat in Eighteenth-Century China.” It discusses the pivotal but less visible role of the Grand Secretariat in everyday administration.