Kate Merkel-Hess

Kate Merkel-Hess is an Associate Professor of History at Penn State University. She is the author of The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and co-editor (with Jeff Wasserstrom and Ken Pomeranz) of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). She was the founding editor of the China Beat blog and now serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies. She has published in both scholarly and general interest venues, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Current History, and the Journal of Social History. She is currently writing a book, Women and Their Warlords, which reconsiders warlordism and nation-building in China between the 1910s and the 1950s by examining elite gender relations and the role of powerful women in China’s political culture.