China Historian Bin Wong to Direct Asia Institute

R. Bin Wong, currently Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine, will become the International Institute's Asia Institute founding director July 1, at which time he will also accept an appointment as professor in the UCLA History Department. At UC Irvine, Wong holds a joint appointment in the History and Economics departments. “Bin Wong is a first-class scholar and a charismatic administrator full of ideas and energies,” said Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost and dean of the International Institute. “His presence on campus will add further distinction to UCLA's world class Asian studies faculty and catalyze further innovation in our programs.”

Wong is a distinguished and creative scholar of Chinese and world history, focusing both on the social and economic forces that have affected the course of Asian history and development over the past thousand years. His publications include China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press, 1997, which has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), and "The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia," which was published in the American Historical Review in 2002. Wong also has considerable administrative experience. He is currently director of the Center for Asian Studies at Irvine, having directed the campus's Asian American Studies program for five years in the mid 1990s.

Wong received his MA and PhD from Harvard University.

For the online video of his September 2002 talk at Columbia University on "Asia's Place in World History," see: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/vforum/02/chinese_perspectives/