Yiching Wu

Yiching Wu was born and grew up in Shanghai, the People's Republic of China. He received his MA from Columbia University and PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty of the University of Toronto, he was a Junior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. Originally an anthropologist by training, his research focuses on the history, society, and politics of Mao’s China (1949-1976), in particular, the history and memory of the Cultural Revolution era (1966-1976). His main scholarly interests include historical anthropology, popular social and political movement, modern Chinese history, Chinese socialism and transition to post-socialism, and the politics of historical knowledge. He is the author of The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2014), which won the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association (USA) and was also shortlisted for the Wallace K. Ferguson Book Prize (for “the outstanding scholarly book in a field of history other than Canadian history”) from the Canadian Historical Association. He is currently working on a monograph that investigates and reconsiders the tortuous path that led up to the Cultural Revolution and its opening crises tentatively titled "The Slippery Slope: The Coming of Mao’s Last Revolution." He is also actively involved in work to gather and preserve Cultural Revolution and Mao-era primary sources and to develop a digital-based cooperative for preserving and sharing primary documents.

Selected Courses

• Mao’s China and Beyond
• The Cultural Revolution
• Nationalism and Revolution in Modern Asia
• Comparative Modernities in Asia
• Special Topics in Twentieth-Century Chinese History
• Theorizing Class beyond the “Cultural Turn”
• China in Transition
• Global Asia
• Specialist Seminar

Selected Presentations

• “How to be a Chef, Farmer, Fisherman, and Hunter all at the Same Time: The Challenges to PRC Historical Scholarship.” Center for East Asian Studies, Columbia University, September 21, 2019.
• “Studying China from Afar: Introducing Anglophone Scholarship on PRC History.” Department of History, Shandong University, Jinan, June 6, 2019.
• “How Not to Walk Like the Crab: De-teleologizing China’s Cultural Revolution.” Department of History, SUNY Buffalo, April 10, 2019.
• “Cultural Revolution Avant la Lettre.” Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Chongqing University, June 5, 2018.
• “When Did the Cultural Revolution Really Begin?” Department of History, McGill University, April 6, 2018.
• “The Long and Short Cultural Revolution.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 29, 2018.
• “Cleopatra’s Nose: Contingency, Path-Dependency and the Opening of Mao’s Last Revolution.” Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University, February 21, 2018.
• “When Did the Cultural Revolution Really Begin?” University of British Columbia, February 16, 2017.
• “The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History and Memory.” Johns Hopkins University Nanjing Center, November 10, 2016.
• “Farewell to the Cultural Revolution.” Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University, September 26, 2016.
• “How Cultural Revolution Became the Cultural Revolution: Reconsidering the Origins and Beginning of Mao’s Last Revolution.” University of California at Riverside, June 24, 2016.
• Keynote Speech, “The Origins of the Cultural Revolution Reconsidered.” International Conference on the 50th Anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, University of Cologne, April 21-24, 2016.