Department/College/UnitHumanities Division

TitleResearch Professor and Distinguished Professor of History Emer.

AffiliationFaculty

Other UCSC Campus AffiliationEast Asian Studies
Feminist Studies Department

Web SiteGail

Primary Office LocationHumanities Building 1
533

Office HoursBy appointment: email gbhers@ucsc.edu

Mail StopHumanities Academic Services

Biography, Education and Training

B.A. Hampshire College
M.A. Stanford University
Ph.D. Stanford University

Summary of Expertise

history of modern China
labor history, China
gender and sexuality, China

Research Interests

Modern Chinese social and cultural history, labor history, women's history, history of sexuality, feminist theory; history, oral narratives, and memory

Awards, Honors and Grants

2012-13 Faculty Research Lecturer
2011-12 President, Association for Asian Studies (currently Past Past President)
2008 Distinguished Professor of History
2007 Guggenheim Fellowship award recipient
2007 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Fellowship, Stanford University
2003 John Dizikes Teaching Award
1997 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, American Historical Association

Selected Publications

• “Gender Trouble’s Afterlife in Chinese Studies,” Journal of Asian Studies, November 2020.

• “Foreword,” China Perspectives, No. 2020.3, special issue on Femininities and Masculinities, https://www.cefc.com.hk/issue/china-perspectives-2020-3/.

• “On Learning to Resist Verdicts and Disappearances: Teaching about Gender in Mao’s China,” PRC History Review 4.2 (August 2019), http://prchistory.org/review-august-2019/; prchistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/4_Hershatter_Gender.pdf.

• “Women and China’s Socialist Construction, 1949–78,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 17:12:2 (June 15, 2019). https://apjjf.org/2019/12/Hershatter.html.

• Women and China’s Revolutions.  Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.

•  “Oral Narratives and the Disappearing Past,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Summer 2016, 40-42. 

• The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. University of California Press, 2011
• Jiyi de xingbie记忆的性别 (Chinese translation of The Gender of Memory, trans. Zhang Yun 张赟).  Zhongguo renmin chubanshe, 2017. 
• “Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis”, American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (Dec. 2008), 1404-1421 (with Wang Zheng).
• Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (University of California International and Area Studies Project, in conjunction with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library, 2007).
• "State of The Field: Women in China's Long Twentieth Century," Journal of Asian Studies 63.4 (November, 2004).
• Guide to Women's Studies in China, ed. with E. Honig, S. Mann, and L. Rofel. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998.
• Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in 20th-Century Shanghai. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. (Winner of American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History.) Chinese translation: Weixian de yuyue, trans. Han Minzhong and Sheng Ning, Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2003.
• Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain. Ed. with Emily Honig, Jonathan Lipman,and Randall Stross. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
• Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State. Ed. with Christina Gilmartin, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994
• Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998 (with Emily Honig).
• The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949. Stanford University Press, 1986.
• “Disquiet in the House of Gender.” Journal of Asian Studies 71.4 (November 2012), 873-894.
• “Getting a Life: The Production of 1950s Women Labor Models in Rural Shaanxi,” in Hu Ying and Joan Judge, eds., Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History University of California Global, Area, and International Archive, Print ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 36-51.
• co-editor and co-compiler, Prosperity's Predicament (Rowman and LIttlefield 2013)