Stephen Halsey

Ph.D., University of Chicago (2007)
Assistant Professor

Office: Rm. 617 Ashe
Phone: (305) 284-2144

Stephen Halsey specializes in modern China with additional fields in economic history, comparative colonialism, and global history. He completed his doctoral work at the University of Chicago in 2007 and has also studied at National Taiwan University and Beijing University. Before coming to Miami, he held the Alice Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Northwestern University and participated in an interdisciplinary teaching program called ‘The Great Society.’

Halsey is currently completing a book manuscript entitled ‘The Sinews of Power: European Imperialism and State-making in Late Imperial and Republican China, 1850-1927.’ Using Chinese, Japanese, and European language sources, he rejects the dominant narrative of political decline and instead argues that the threat of foreign aggression after 1850 ushered in the most innovative period of state-making in China since the early seventeenth century. In addition, his work engages in a systematic comparison with early modern Britain to identify cross-cultural similarities in the process of state-making, highlighting the intimate linkages between warfare, taxation, and bureaucratic growth in both the Chinese and European contexts. Halsey’s research also suggests that important differences in political economy spared China from the formal colonization characteristic of regions such as Bengal and Malaya. He has held fellowships with the Fulbright-Hays DDRA program, the Blakemore Foundation, FLAS, and the Earhart Foundation, and his thesis project received the Richard Saller Prize in March 2008 for the best doctoral dissertation in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.

Prior to his enrollment at Chicago, Halsey earned an interdisciplinary degree in diplomacy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and subsequently served as an analyst of US foreign relations in Boston, MA. He retains an active interest in contemporary policy issues and has regularly conducted seminars in Mandarin on the American government and economy for visiting delegations of Chinese party cadres.