Xiao Chen, an assistant professor of history at UC Riverside, has been awarded a Luce/ACLS Early Career Long-Term Fellowship in China Studies.
The fellowship, which is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies, provides early-career scholars with a grant to pursue sustained research and writing on a topic related to China and its global influence.
With a yearlong research leave made possible by the $45,000 grant as well as support from UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Chen plans to complete a book manuscript on how the Qing Empire relied on systems of punishment to colonize the realm’s frontier regions, shape ethnic hierarchies, and consolidate power.
“I feel extremely honored to have received this fellowship,” he said. “I am especially excited because it will allow me to incorporate many of the suggestions, new ideas, and additional research that have emerged since my dissertation defense into the manuscript I am now developing from the dissertation.”
The title of Chen’s manuscript is “Punishment, Frontier, and Ethnicity in the Making of the Qing Empire (1636-1912).”
“It examines the transportation of convicts from the Qing heartlands to Northern Manchuria and Xinjiang — a vast system of coerced migration that linked the ‘metropolitan centers’ of China Proper to the ‘peripheries’ of Inner Asia — forming one of the world’s largest and most complex networks of penal transportation by the early 19th century,” Chen writes in an abstract of the project. “This book has charted the rise of a new convict labor regime engaged in categorizing, exploiting, and ‘rehabilitating’ convicts, which grew out of Qing colonial practices in Northern Manchuria, Western Mongolia, and Xinjiang.”
Chen joined the faculty of UCR’s Department of History in 2024. He earned a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.