Department Of History Welcomes New Assistant Professors

Please join us in welcoming our new Assistant Professors Christopher Bonner who specializes in African American history and Ting Zhang who specializes in cultural and legal historian of late imperial China.

Please join us in welcoming our new Assistant Professors Christopher Bonner who specializes in African American history and  Ting Zhang  who specializes in cultural and legal historian of late imperial China.

Christopher Bonner specializes in African American history, particularly black protest in the early United States. He is at work on a manuscript titled "The Price of Citizenship," which examines black activists' efforts to construct American citizenship before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. In their public protest statements, black people from across the antebellum free states worked to create a specific, inclusive citizen status, a central project in the long processes of creating American law and society. He is more broadly interested in the roots and results of radical politics, the nature and meanings of historical violence, and the creation of black freedom in a slaveholding republic. His teaching interests include African American politics and culture, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, and race and ethnicity in early America. Originally from Chesapeake, VA, he earned his B.A. from Howard University and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Ting Zhang received her BA and MA from Beijing University and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2014. She is a cultural and legal historian of late imperial China, with a particular research interest in print culture and the circulation of legal knowledge. Her current project, “Information and Power: Printing, Law, and the Making of Chinese Legal Culture, 1644-1911,” explores the production and reception of legal knowledge, and the role of legal information in the formation of early modern Chinese legal culture. For this research, she draws upon 131 different editions of the Qing Code and many other legal imprints, using sources in libraries and on-line digital open source collections.

Ting Zhang has received fellowships or grants from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the China Scholarship Council, and the Association for Asian Studies. Before joining the History Department at the University of Maryland, she has taught courses at Beijing University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Delaware, and UC San Diego. Her publications, in English and Chinese, include three journal articles, five book chapters, and two translations, for example, “Penitence Silver and the Politics of Punishment in the Qianlong Reign (1736-1795),” in Late Imperial China (Vol. 31, No. 2, December 2010) and “Marketing Legal Information: Commercial Publications of the Great Qing Code, 1644-1911” in Madeleine Zelin and Li Chen eds., New Insights on Chinese Legal History, Culture, and Modernity (Leiden&Boston: Brill, to be published in 2014).