I am the Director of the Center for Global Collections in the Penn Libraries. I coordinate collection development in non-Western languages, oversee the Libraries' individual global collections, and lead the development of our new Center. I serve global collections within the Libraries and across campus, aiming to bring the distinctive contributions of area studies librarians and collections into the full range of the university’s work.
I also teach graduate seminars in Chinese history at Penn, in Chinese history of the tenth to thirteenth centuries and in pre-modern Chinese economic history. My current research investigates the information order across the Liao, Song, and Jin dynasties through a textual analysis of the Liao and Jin official histories. I have also worked on Chinese foreign trade during the Song dynasty and am generally interested in economic history and the history of Chinese frontiers during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. In addition to formal classes, I work closely with graduate students in EALC and in other departments to support and develop their research, and I serve on dissertation committees. I have received research support from the Social Sciences Research Council and was recently a Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar in Taiwan.
I am book review editor for the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, a member of the advisory board for the Bibliography of Asian Studies, and chair of the Center for Research Libraries International Collections and Content Group. Within Penn, I represent the Libraries on the university's International Liaisons Group.