About Me

My name is Xin Yu (余欣), Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My research interests include late imperial Chinese history, book history, and history of the family. At UWM, I am teaching and developing courses on Chinese history, Asian history, book history, and family history. I am also a junior fellow of Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

My first book project, which is based on my doctoral dissertation “Publishing at the Grassroots: Print Culture and Rural Society in Early Modern China” (Washington University in St. Louis, 2022), surveys the history of Chinese genealogies between 1450 and 1644. Genealogies were large compilations of family-related texts and images. They started to be popular around 1500 and became possibly the most widespread type of books in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I found that the proliferation of genealogies was both a product of and a catalyst for the development of lineage organizations (large-scale patrilineal organizations that performed multiple functions) in southern China. It was also a process in which book and print culture started to penetrate rural society, reaching both the literate and illiterate populations at the bottom of Chinese society.