Kate Merkel-Hess

Kate Merkel-Hess is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Penn State. She is a historian of modern China with interests in liberalism, democracy, mass media, and mass mobilization.

Merkel-Hess is the author of Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She was co-editor (with Kenneth Pomeranz and Jeffrey Wasserstrom) of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). She is currently working on her next book, The Long Resistance: Dissent and Disunity in China’s War with Japan, which examines how China’s early twentieth-century political disunity created multiple centers for experimentation in governance and social policy that contributed to China’s resistance to Japan.

Merkel-Hess’s articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, Journal of Social History, Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China, Twentieth-Century China, History Compass, Current History, ChinaFile, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2026, she was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. She has also received funding for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association for Asian Studies, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Recent Publications:

“Underground in Plain Sight: The New Life Movement, Women’s Publications and Leftist Mobilization in Wartime China,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 27 (2025): 211-241.

Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China. University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2024.

“A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan, Feng Yuxiang, and the Politics of Intimacy in Twentieth Century China,” Frontiers of History in China 11, no. 3 (2016): 431-457.

The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

“The Public Health of Village Private Life: Reform and Resistance in Early Twentieth Century China,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 881-903.

Co-authored with Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “The Tiananmen Protests and Their Aftermath, 1989-1999,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

“Acting Out Reform: Theater and Village in the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement.” Twentieth-Century China 37, no. 2 (May 2012): 161-180.

Co-editor with Kenneth L. Pomeranz and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

“Reading the Rural Modern: Literacy and Morality in Republican China,” History Compass 7, no. 1 (2009): 44-54.

Awards and Service:

Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, 2026

Associate Editor, Journal of Asian Studies, 2018-2020

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2017-18

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2016

Mellon/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship, 2009-2010

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2008-2009

Recent Courses:

HIST 011 – World History, 1500-Present

HIST 183 – Gender, Family, and Society in East Asia

HIST 184 – The Pacific War

HIST 302W – World War II in Global Perspective

HIST 486 – Twentieth-Century China

HIST 581 – Late Imperial and Modern China

HIST 582 – Women and Gender in Modern Chinese History