Xue Zhang
Assistant Professor of History
History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences
Xue Zhang is a historian of early modern China, specializing in cartography, science and technology, borderlands, and bureaucratic practices. Her peer-reviewed works have been published in The Journal of Chinese History and Isis: A Journal of the History of Science. She is currently working on her first book, which combines the approaches of political history, intellectual history, and history of science to explain Qing China’s counterintuitive policy shift in Xinjiang — the empire’s Muslim borderland in Inner Asia — in the late nineteenth century. Her second project looks at low-ranking clerks in the Qing central government. Although at the bottom of the imperial bureaucracy, they were the ones who directed the flow of information. She received her a Ph.D. degree from Princeton in 2020 and joined Reed in 2022. At Reed, she teaches courses on the history of China and China’s interactions with other parts of the world. She also contributes to the Chinese Humanities.