Distinguished Professor of History, UC Santa Cruz
Gail is a historian of Modern China who holds the Distinguished Professor of History chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She previously taught in the history department at Williams College. After graduating from Hampshire College, she earned a doctorate in Chinese History at Stanford University. She was elected vice-president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2010 and subsequently elected president the following year. She was an assistant director for the documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace. Her research interests include modern Chinese women's history and labor studies. Her 2011 monograph, The Gender of Memory, uses the lens of rural women in Shaanxi Province, China, to examine revolutionary China in the 1950s and 1960s. Her other works include Her works include The Workers of Tianjin (1986, Chinese translation 2016), Personal Voices: China Women in the 1980s (1988, with Emily Honig), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997, Chinese translation 2003), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2004), The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011; Chinese translation 2017) and Women and China’s Revolutions (2019).
