Professor Lean offers courses in modern Chinese history, gender, urban Chinese history, print culture in nineteenth and twentieth century China, and cultural theory and historical methods. She is currently finishing her book manuscript, Politics of Passion: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Public Sympathy in Nineteen-thirties China, which examines a highly sensational crime of female passion and documents the rise of "public sympathy" as a powerful new moral and political authority in early twentieth-century China. Articles based on this project have appeared in Twentieth Century China; a conference volume edited by the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica of Taiwan; the Taiwanese journal, Research on Women in Modern Chinese History; as well as in a forthcoming journal by Peking University. Other publications include “Reflections on Theory, Gender and the Psyche in the Study of Chinese History” in Funü lishi yanjiu fukan (1998), and “The Modern Elixir: Medicine as a Consumer Item in the Early Twentieth-Century Press” in UCLA Historical Journal (1995). Her second project is concerned with health and beauty in China’s early twentieth century consumer culture. Professor Lean received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and Ph.D. (2001) from UCLA. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2002, Professor Lean spent a year in a tenure-track position teaching in the History Department of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.