Teaching Fellows

Carl Kubler is a historian of late imperial and modern China. His research centers on how the forces of global trade, migration, and cross-cultural encounters shape everyday life, with particular emphasis on the history of contact between China and the West. His first book project, titled Beyond Conflict: Global Trade and Everyday Relations between China and the West, 1780-1860, examines the dynamics of socioeconomic opportunity seeking and conflict resolution between merchants, sailors, prostitutes, interpreters, coolies, cooks, pirates, and other liminal actors whose global circulations helped shape the course of Sino-Western relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Combining a granular focus on the microeconomies of the Pearl River Delta with a broad scope that spans six continents and draws on sources across eight languages, Kubler pushes back against conflict-centered narratives of Chinese-foreigner interaction and argues that mutually incentivized problem solving, rather than conflict, characterized transnational relations on the ground level. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and Association for Asian Studies, among others.