Dr Ling Zhang 張玲 read philosophy, history and literature at Peking University in Beijing. She studied Chinese economic history, environmental history and history of Chinese science and technology at the University of Cambridge and St John’s College. Before returning to Cambridge, she was an Associate Professor in Chinese History at Boston College (2012-2024), postdoctoral fellow in the Program of Agrarian Studies at Yale University (2011-2012), Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Center for the Environment at Harvard University (2009-2011), and Lecturer in Chinese and Chinese History at Newcastle University (2008-2009).
Dr Ling Zhang 張玲 teaches Pre-modern Chinese history, Chinese environmental history and literary Chinese.
Dr Ling Zhang 張玲 is interested in working with postgraduate research students who seek to study middle-period China with interests in political economy, science and technology, environment and ecology, as well as the relationship between ecology and diverse knowledge systems (official knowledge, vernacular knowledge, embodied know-how, tools and infrastructure, medicine and healing, religious and cultural practices, etc.). She is also interested in working with students who wish to explore the above-mentioned issues in comparative contexts.
She has diverse and wide-ranging research interests, but they all revolve around historical intersections among environment, economy, politics and technology, as well as around material and representational entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds. Whereas her formal academic training focuses on the Chinese middle period, her current research and writing agendas sprawl across different periods along diverse timelines for the purpose of subverting the dominance of humancentric temporal schemes over our historical consciousness and historical writing. A significant part of her scholarly endeavours aims at introducing theoretical and methodological interventions that may inspire new ways of thinking and writing history.
Her first book, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), received the George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History by the American Society for Environmental History in 2017. With John McNeill, she co-edited the Studies in Environment and History book series published by Cambridge University Press. As an associate researcher at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, she has been convening a research series called ‘Environment in Asia’ since 2012 (view the YouTube channel for several recent EIA events).
She is currently writing two monographs: 108 Metres: A Geohistory of East China and Geotrauma: Earthly Healing through Geostorytelling. Both books explore dynamic inter- and intra-actions among historical actors across geo-, bio-, and human spheres. She is participating in two collaborative projects, one on global medieval peasantry and the other on river systems in Asia. She is also developing a new collaborative project that explores the relationship between ecology and healing in medieval worlds.
Together with Dr. David Mozina, she is working on a collaborative project entitled ‘Ecology, Religion, and Multispecies Healing’.