Education
- BA Yale University, 1995
- MA Stanford University, 2000
- PhD University of California, Berkeley, 2007
- "Say No to Bat Fried Rice: Changing the Narrative of Coronavirus and Chinese Food," in Food and Foodways 28.3 (Fall 2020), 237-49
- "What is 'Chinese' Food? Historicizing the Concept of Culinary Regionalism," in Global Food History 6.2 (Summer 2020), pp. 89-109
- Editor, Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
- “The Julia Child of Chinese Cooking, or the Fu Pei-mei of French Food?: Comparative Contexts of Female Culinary Celebrity,” in Gastronomica 18.1 (February 2018), pp. 15-26
- “Margaret Sanger in Translation: Gender, Class and Birth Control in 1920s China” in Journal of Women’s History 29.3 (Fall 2017), pp. 61-83
- Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2014)
- “Working With/In the Archive,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 13–29
- “Replicating the Colonial Expert: The Problem of Translation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Straits Settlements” in Social History 34.4 (November 2009), 428–46
- This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
- <a href="https://history.unc.edu/graduate-student/ruochen-cao/" Ruochen Cao(Co-advised with Erik Gellman)
- <a href="https://history.unc.edu/graduate-student/zhelun-zhou/" Zhelun Zhou(Co-advised with Michael Tsin)
- Xinong Wang (Co-advised with Michael Tsin)
- Donald Santacaterina (PhD '22-'23)
- HIST 285—Twentieth-Century China
- HIST 284—Late Imperial China
- HIST 550—Gender in Chinese History
- HNRS 353—The Cultural History of Food in China
- HIST 398—China Bound: Western Travel Writing on China
Research Interests
Michelle T. King specializes in modern Chinese gender history and food history. She was recently awarded a 2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant for her book project on Taiwan's beloved postwar television cooking celebrity, Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004). She has also received major fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the University of Texas at Austin Institute for Historical Studies. Her article on Margaret Sanger's 1922 lecture trip to China won the Journal of Women's History Biennial Best Article Prize for 2017-18.
King recently edited Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), a collection of comparative studies of culinary nationalism in East, Southeast, and South Asia, and a special issue of Global Food History (Summer 2020) on culinary regionalism in China. Her first book, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2014), placed cross-cultural critiques of female infanticide in China in critical perspective. Her work has appeared in Food and Foodways, Global Food History, Gastronomica, Journal of Women’s History, Social History, and other publications.
Some Notable Publications
Graduate Students
Courses Taught (as schedule allows)
For current information about course offerings, click here.