Speaker: Micah Muscolino, Professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History, University of California San Diego

More information coming soon.

Micah Muscolino received his B.A. from UC Berkeley (1999) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2006). He specializes in the environmental history of modern China.

His first book, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (2009), focused on the history of China’s most important marine fishery, the waters around the Zhoushan Islands, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of its main commercial fish stocks in the 1970s. Examining the private and state interests that shaped struggles for the control of common resources, this study made a pioneering contribution to the field of Chinese environmental history by demonstrating how local, regional, and transnational forces intersected to transform the marine ecosystem.

His second book The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 (2015) engaged with the historiography of war and militarization in modern China and the interdisciplinary scholarship on war and the environment in world history. This study focused on Henan province, a frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human dislocation during World War II. Tracing the history of Henan’s war-induced flood and famine disasters and their aftermath, the book conceptualized the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Efforts to procure and exploit nature’s energy in various forms shaped military strategy, the fates of refugees, and the trajectory of environmental change.

He is currently researching the history of water and soil conservation in Northwest China’s Loess Plateau region from the 1940s to the present. Drawing on county-level archives and fieldwork conducted in villages in Northwest China’s Gansu province, the project explores how state-led water and soil conservation campaigns in Gansu transformed the biophysical environment and altered the lives of people who depended on water and soil for their survival.

He has also published numerous articles on China’s place in global environmental history, maritime connections between Mainland China and Taiwan, energy history, and the history of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. As organizer and editor of the “Historical Perspectives on China’s Environment” series for chinadialogue.net, he seeks to heighten the impact of Chinese environmental history by making cutting-edge academic research accessible to journalists, NGOs, and policymakers.

He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ with funding from a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an invited Visiting Professor at Harvard University. His research has also received fellowships and grants from the British Academy, the Chiang Chiang-kuo Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.Muscolino taught at St. Mary’s College of California, Georgetown University, and the University of Oxford before coming to UCSD in 2018. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of modern China and environmental history, he directs Ph.D. students working on all topics in Chinese history during late Qing, Republican, and PRC periods.