Teaches modern Chinese and East Asian history, with special interests in social history, nationalism, consumer culture, and everyday life under communism. Professor Gerth regularly teaches surveys of East Asian Civilization and modern Chinese history, a seminar on the history of consumer culture in East Asia, and an introductory graduate seminar on the study of history. His first book, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, examines the connections between nationalism and consumerism in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, he has published and presented many papers on comparative aspects of modern East Asian and world history, including “Consumption as Resistance” in The Japanese Empire in East Asia and its Postwar Legacy and “Commodifying Anti-Imperialism: MSG and the Flavor of Patriotic Production” in Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market. He received numerous awards to support his research including from the Fulbright Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Blakemore Foundation, and Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho) Scholarship for study at Tokyo University.

Current Activities

I am currently researching two book projects. Most immediately, I am writing a book under contract with Cambridge University Press conceptualizing consumerism in twentieth-century China. This book addresses two related questions and raises a third. How has the introduction and spread of consumerism dramatically altered everyday life in China over the past 100-plus years? Likewise, how has Chinese consumerism shaped the modern world? And, finally, how might the spread of consumerism re-make China and the world again in the twenty-first century?

I have also conducted several years of research on a second project, the impact of the Chinese Communist Party’s radical social policies on everyday life in the nation’s urban centers in the 1950s. What did it mean to live in “Communist China” in these early years? I expect to write a broad-ranging study covering many aspects of urban life based on the archival materials, periodicals, memoirs, and interviews that I have begun to collect in China.

My research interests concern how China has related to the rest of the world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While addressing issues of growing interest to all modern historians, rather than simply reproduce for the history of China the scholarly insights generated from histories of Western countries, I focus on how these issues studied in East Asian contexts challenge both established narratives of the region and the assumptions underlying scholarship derived from Western cases. To develop these projects, I have organized or co-organized three international conferences on East Asia’s economic and cultural integration. The first two (November 2006 and September 2007) focus on the influence of Taiwan on the economic and cultural developments in China since 1978. The third (August 2007), involving a collaboration with institutions in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Korea, examines cultural commodity flows throughout modern East Asia.