Yiyun Peng

Biography

Yiyun Peng is a historian of late imperial and modern China, focusing on environmental history, the history of science and technology, and economic history. Her research and teaching interests also extend to East Asia and Southeast Asia.

She is working on her first book project, tentatively titled "A Herbaceous Revolution: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970." It explores how various handicraft industries centered on processing crops into commodities—indigo dye, ramie (a plant fiber) cloth, tobacco, and bamboo paper—in late imperial upland Southeast China sparked a prolonged herbaceous revolution that profoundly reshaped the region’s mountainous environment and integrated its economy with larger domestic and overseas markets.

This project has been supported by the Association for Asian Studies, the Society for the History of Technology, the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, Cornell University, and Harvard University. In its dissertation form, the project won the Messenger Chalmers Prize for the best dissertation in the Department of History at Cornell University. A portion of this work has appeared in Late Imperial China.