Pierre Fuller

Pierre Fuller received his doctorate in History at the University of California, Irvine and his BA as a double major in English and Theology at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Before arriving at Sciences Po, he held permanent positions at the University of Manchester and Monash University in Melbourne.

Since his arrival in the Centre for History, he has received his Habilitation accreditation to supervise doctoral research in History.

His research has concerned modern Chinese political cultures, examining governance, media and daily life and customs during urban and rural times of crisis in 19th and 20th century China.

His first book captures everyday life in Chinese villages, towns and cities in the 1920s by examining communal, charitable and official responses to famine in north China. In doing so, the book shifts attention away from foreign relief interventions in modern Chinese disasters towards activity along indigenous social networks for what it reveals about everyday values and capacities in China a century ago.

Fuller’s second book seeks to examine Chinese social revolution in its embryonic stages by reconsidering the nature of Maoist discourse on life in prerevolutionary China and its uses in political campaigns against elements of “the old society.” In doing so, it considers practices of social and cultural erasure shared by revolutionary writers and artists with their Nationalist and liberal counterparts, along with Western poets and playwrights and missionaries over the same period. It does this to shed light on the relationship between knowledge destruction and physical violence in modern China and the surprising kinship between China’s revolutionary project and the Western civilizing mission as each were applied to rural Chinese communities.

He is currently in the beginning stages of a project examining the origins of social science and social surveying methods in 19th and early 20th century China. He invites graduate students interested in working on a range of social, cultural, political and environmental subjects in 18th to 20th century China as well as transnational projects.

LAST PUBLICATIONS

• Fuller, Pierre. 2022. Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past. Cambridge University Press (April)

• Fuller, Pierre. 2022. Compte rendu de Yunte Deng, The History of Famine Relief in China. 679 pp. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Journal of Asian Studies (March).

• Fuller, Pierre. 2022. “Migration and State-Making: A Beiyang Settlement Scheme Along the Amur in 1921.” Twentieth Century China, special issue “State Building through Political Disunity in Republican China,” edited by Xavier Paulès and David Serfass 47/1 (January). 

• Fuller Pierre, 2020. "Lessons for today from the Song dynasty: Confucian how-to manuals" Compte rendu de Pierre-Etienne Will, Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography. 1,488 pp. Brill, 2020. Times Literary Supplement https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/handbooks-and-anthologies-for-officials-in-imperial-china-pierre-etienne-will-review-pierre-fuller/
• Fuller Pierre, 2019. Famine Relief in Warlord China. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series, Harvard University Asia Center.