Meng Ran Xu

MENG Ran is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese history. Interested in the relationship between socialist revolutions, economic development, and socioenvironmental justice, her dissertation is tentatively titled "Socialist Nature: Land, Peasants, and Agricultural Development in Mao's China." Through the modern transformations in peasant's relationship with growth, labor, water, and seeds, the dissertation looks at the ways in which human's relationship with the rest of nature went through fundamental changes in the second half of the 20th century under a socialist regime. Her research interests include environmental history of late imperial and modern China, history of socialist and post-socialist rural China, and theories of ecological critique.