IONA MAN-CHEONG
Associate Professor (Ph.D., Yale University, 1991)
Curriculum vitae
Email: iona.man-cheong@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Late imperial China, empire, oceans, diaspora, transnationalism
I investigate the Chinese diaspora, or Chinese overseas, with a particular interest
in Chinese maritime history in the transoceanic world of the Age of Sail. My focus
is on questions of cross-cultural encounter and interaction, racialization, ethnic
and racial mixing, and issues of self-making and governmentality within the eighteenth-century
working-class Chinese maritime community. I began my career as a China historian of
the Qing Chinese elite, which resulted in The Class of 1761: Examinations, State, and Elites in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2004). My current project, "The Interstices of Empire:
Chinese Seafarers and Cross-cultural Making," investigates themes of socio-cultural
identity-making, agency, and the struggle of the working poor within, against, and
for the larger forces of society; and the social history of Chinese diasporic subjects.