Faculty Spotlight: Carl Kubler

Carl Kubler, assistant professor in the Department of History, is a scholar of China’s global past. His scholarship and teaching sit at the intersection of Chinese history, Asian American history, and diaspora studies and center on how the forces of trade, migration, and cross-cultural encounter shape everyday life, with particular emphasis on the history of contact between China and the West.

Tell me about your scholarly work.

Broadly speaking, I am a global historian of late imperial and modern China. I specialize in the history of China’s relations with Europe and the Americas since the eighteenth century and am especially interested in issues of everyday experience: for example, how transnational trade impacted the lives of non-elite individuals like sailors, shopkeepers, boatwomen, coolies, etc., what cross-cultural communication and problem-solving looked like, and other dynamics at the grassroots that can help us recontextualize the bigger stories we tell about the history of relations between “China” and “the West.”

How is your scholarly work adding to the greater field?

One of the key thrusts of my work is to situate Chinese history globally and to put Chinese people and events into conversation with happenings elsewhere in the world: to de-exceptionalize China and insert it into mainstream narratives. In my work on international relations, I am also particularly interested in the history of conflict and how conflict is understood and narrativized. One of the central arguments of my first book is that conflict is actually quite over-emphasized in existing histories of Sino-Western relations, and that for the most part, flexible cooperation and problem-solving, rather than conflict, better characterized transnational relations between Chinese people, Europeans and Americans; but such “non-conflict” has been overshadowed by sensationalizing narrative impulses as well as structural biases that are built into archival records.

How did you become interested in this topic?

I have always been interested in narratives of human experience and how people in different spaces around the world understand themselves and each other. Chinese history offers fertile ground for tackling such questions and exploring how moments of increased globalization and interconnection have affected people’s lives in myriad ways. Better understanding the global history of China also holds real-world ramifications for how we think about the contours of Sino-Western relations today.

What are you most excited to accomplish as a faculty member at CMU?

I’m currently working on two books: one on the grassroots history of social and economic relations between China and the West during China’s Qing period, and another that examines the history of the so-called “coolie trade” or trafficking of Asian indentured laborers in the Atlantic World as slavery gradually came to an end in the Americas. In my teaching at CMU, I’m also excited to build up a broader program in Asian, Asian American and global diaspora studies. This is a set of topics that is highly relevant to a number of different geopolitical events in the world today, and which I look forward to helping our students have the opportunity to explore more deeply.

What are your goals for the next generation of scholars?

It is tough to forecast what people will be working on in the future, but one thing I hope is that students and scholars will remain committed to taking new intellectual risks, both in the types of stories they tell and in their willingness to push back against received wisdom. Much of what we think we know today could very well turn out to be wrong, but it will take courage, creativity and hard work to prove it so.

The Faculty Spotlight series features new and junior faculty at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Stay tuned for our next installment to learn more about the dynamic and engaging research and scholarly work being conducted in the college.