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Associate Professor of Chinese History & Director of Graduate Studies: Dr. David G. Atwill received his PhD from the University of Hawaii, Manoa in 1999 and joined the Penn State Department of History and Religious Studies in 2002 specializing in late imperial and modern Chinese history. He has carried out his research as a visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology, Yunnan University and at the Humboldt University (Berlin). In 2007-08 he received a Fulbright to pursue research in the People's Republic of China and is currently funded by a Mellon New Direction Fellowship (2007-2011). He began his tenure as the Department of History's Director of Graduate Studies in the Fall of 2010.
His teaching at Penn State ranges from introductory course such as World History to 1500 (HIST 10) and Modern East Asia (HIST 175) to upper level courses on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century China (HIST 485W and HIST 486). He also offers courses cross-listed in Religious Studies like Tibet: Sacred Places, Spaces and People (RLST 197A) and Islam's Orient: Islam, Nationalism and Ethnic Violence in China (RLST 597C).
Prof. Atwill's research has largely centered on the ethno-religious identity of the Muslim Chinese (or Hui) in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. He has published several articles on this topic and a monograph entitled The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwestern China, 1856-1873 was published by Stanford University Press (2006). A sourcebook, co-authored with Yurong Yang Atwill, Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectives from 1644 to the Present, was published with Prentice Hall in March 2009.
Prof. Atwill is now beginning two new projects: an examination of Lin Zexu and late imperial conceptions of China's borderlands with an emphasis on Chinese conceptions of 'barbarians' (yi), traitors (hanjian), and internal boundaries and a study of Tibetan Muslims focusing on the themes of transregionalism, competing geographies and multiple identities within their communities. |
The Chinese Sultanate