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.

Current Activities:

I am currently researching and writing a book that explores 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.