Jenny Huangfu Day

Professor of History   

I am a historian of modern China at Skidmore College, where I teach courses on East Asian civilization, late imperial and modern China, modern Japan, and a variety of topics courses on East Asia’s encounter with the West. My research focuses on the diplomatic, legal, and cultural history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My work centers on questions of sovereignty, jurisdiction, cross-cultural imagination, and the role of information and communication in modern state-making. My research projects don’t reflect a single school of inquiry, but follow questions that occurred to me in reading and teaching. Many of these questions came from archival research, teaching, and the lacunae exposed by contemporary debates, when political events reveal how much our understanding of modern China and its relationship with the West still rests on over-simplification of complex issues and entrenched myths. What these projects have in common is a belief in combining the classic toolkit of the historian — archival research — with interdisciplinary perspectives to shed new light on those myths and keep opening new lines of inquiry.

I am currently working on several projects, including a monograph tentatively titled “Song Qingling and the Afterlives of the Chinese Revolution,” which explores Song's political career after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925 and the institutionalization of her image after her death in 1981. It will be the first English-language study that seeks to place the story of her life in conversation with broader scholarship on gender, media, revolutionary mythmaking, and public memory.

Books:

• The Qing World, co-edited with Bian He and Emily Mokros. Routledge. Under Contract.
• Transborder Fugitives, Extradition, and Political Crimes in Modern China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
• Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (Outstanding Academic Title of 2019 by ACRL Choice.
• (Chinese translation) 遠西旅人：晚清外交與信息秩序. 上海人民出版社, 2024.
• Wanqing zhu Ying shiguan zhaohui dang’an 晚清駐英使館照會檔案 [Letters from the Qing Legation in London]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe 上海古籍出版社, 2020.

Peer reviewed articles:

• “The Double Agent between Empires: Diplomacy, Conspiracy, and Reconnaissance during the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895,” in Modern Transimperial Intermediaries, ed. Cyrus Schayegh, Leiden: Brill, 2025: 49-70.
• “History Textbooks and Historical Education in Republican China,” in The Sage Handbook of Interpreting Chinese History, eds. Kristin Stapleton, Xin Fan, Els van Dongen, Sage Publications, 2025: 212-226.
• “From Envoy Journals to Legation Reports: Regulating Knowledge of Foreigners in Late Imperial and Modern China.”Journal of Modern Chinese History, vol. 16, no. 1 (2022): 91-122.
• “The Enigma of a Taiping Fugitive: The Illusion of Justice and the ‘Political Offence Exception’ in Extradition from Hong Kong.”Law and History Review, vol. 39, no. 3 (2021): 415-450.
• “Mediating Sovereignty: The Qing Legation in London and its Diplomatic Representation of China, 1876-1901,”Modern Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 4 (2021): 1151-1184.
• “The Textbook War: Educating Children in the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945,” Twentieth-Century China, vol. 46, no. 2 (2021): 105-129.
• “晚清駐英公使館與國際法的運用：以雙語照會為中心的考察,” 中華文史論叢, no. 2 (2020): 85-115.
• “From Fire-Wheel Boats to Cities on the Sea: Changing Perceptions of the Steamships in the Late Qing, 1830s-1900s,” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (2015): 50-63.
• “Searching for the Roots of Western Wealth and Power: Guo Songtao and Education in Victorian England,” Late Imperial China, vol. 35, no. 1 (June 2014): 1-37.
• “Roads to Salvation: Shen Congwen, Xiao Qian and the Problem of Non-Communist Celebrity Writers, 1948-1957,”Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 22, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 39-87.

Other publications:

• “Teaching Chinese History in a Liberal Arts College” 我在美国大学教中国历史：算法时代与“特朗普冲击”下的课堂, 澎湃, May 12, 2026.
• “Guo Songtao: Diplomat and First Chinese Minister to Britain,” in Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives – From Empire to Republic, 1796-1912.
• “Kua Xueke de waijiao xinxi shi” 跨學科的外交信息史 [On the history of diplomacy and information order across disciplines], 澎湃, May 17, 2021.
• “Visualizing Qing Diplomats in the West,” Visualising China, October 23, 2020.
• “Three Ways of Incorporating Storytelling into Chinese History Courses,” Education about Asia, vol. 24, no. 3 (2019).