Susan Glosser

Associate Professor of History/Department Chair

department: History
office: 421 Miller Center
mailstop: 41
phone: 503-768-7488
e-mail: sglosser@lclark.edu

Susan Glosser completed her Ph.D. in East Asian History at Berkeley in 1995. Her research specialty is modern China (19th and 20th centuries) and she focuses on gender, urban culture, and political culture. Her book on family reform in China in the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953 was published by University of California Press in 2003. Professor Glosser is currently researching the lives of women in Shanghai under Japanese occupation during World War Two. She is also collecting information on the dairy industry in China. Professor Glosser has lived in Taipei and Shanghai. In the summer of 2005 she established her own press, Opal Mogus Books. The press will specialize in translations of unique Chinese documents and materials that have been edited and annotated for use in the classroom. The first publication, Li Fengjin: How the New Marriage Law Helped Chinese Women Stand Up, is a lively example of government propaganda in the People's Republic of China. Professor Glosser is currently editing a collection of Shanghai street vendor songs.

Education:
Ph.D., East Asian History, University of California, Berkeley, 1995
M.A., Comparative Gender History, State University of New York, Binghamton, 1985
B.A., Philosophy and History, State University of New York, Binghamton, 1983

Teaching:
I am responsible for teaching the whole of Chinese history. I share with my colleague in Japanese history the course "Early East Asian History," which offers a thematic overview of China and Japan from the dawn of time until about the thirteenth century. The rest of my courses are dedicated to China. My obsession with history is driven by a fascination with how people explain the world to themselves and by a curiosity about the human experience both then and now. In all of my classes I ask students to read a wide variety of primary sources and to grapple with them through writing and discussion. I hope that students leave my class with sharper analytical skills, an appreciation for the importance of the past, and an empathy for cultures different from their own.

Research:
I have published a book on the conjugal family ideal in China in the first half of the twentieth century. I explain how intellectuals, politicians, and entrepeneurs manipulated this ideal through a rhetoric of "family values" in order to articulate their hopes for the Chinese nation and their vision of their place in the power structure. Because one of my entrepreneurial reformers ran a sizable dairy in Shanghai, I have also begun a history of milk in China. The projects have a central theme in common: what do people think is good for them and why? I am now research women's lives in Shanghai under Japanese occupation (1937-1945). This project will be much more empirical than the family and milk studies. As brutal as the history of Japanese occupation is, I am drawn to this topic because we know how people wanted to live their lives, but very little about how they actually lived. I hope my study of occupied Shanghai will contribute to the work of witnessing -- one of the most important of the historian's intellectual and moral obligations.

Life Experiences:
I did not start to study Chinese until after I earned my B.A. and then only because my Chinese history professor, John Chaffee, told me, "You know, you could learn Chinese." I went to Middlebury College for two summers of intensive Chinese, interspersing the summer sessions with my work on the Master's degree. After earning my Master's, I worked for two years to save enough money to continue studying Chinese in Taiwan. I waited tables, taught GRE and SAT prepatory courses and English for Berlitz, and worked as a receptionist in an orthodontist's office. After one year in Taiwan at the Mandarin Center I entered the Ph.D. program at Berkeley. I lived in Shanghai for a year (1992-1993) while doing my dissertation research. Since then I have returned to the mainland for briefer stays. In the summer of 1997 I spent five weeks studying Buddhist Cave paintings in Northwest China at Dunhuang. In the summer of 2004 I spent a month in Shanghai doing research for my book on World War Two.