Prof. Dr. Jennifer Altehenger

Curriculum Vitae

Jennifer Altehenger is Associate Professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at the University of Oxford/History Faculty and Merton College. She was educated at Cambridge, Qingdao, and Heidelberg, followed by an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Fairbank Centre, Harvard University. After several years as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King’s College, she was appointed to her current post at the University of Oxford and Merton College in 2019. Her research focuses on the history of modern China, especially the People’s Republic of China, and her publications have explored the history of law and civic education, design and materiality, and cultural production and information management. She is the author of Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1989 (Harvard UP, 2018) and of several edited volumes. In addition, she is series co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in the History of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge University Press) and Transformations of Modern China (De Gruyter), and Associate Editor of the journal Modern China. Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, she is currently completing a book entitled Socialism by Design: How Mass-Produced Furniture Modernized China (under contract with Princeton University Press).