Madeleine Zelin is professor of modern Chinese history and director of the East Asian National Resource Center at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1970 and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. Professor Zelin teaches Qing history as well as a variety of courses focusing on Chinese legal history and China’s early modern social and economic transformation.

Professor Zelin’s research has taken her to archives in Taiwan, Beijing, Ya’an, Chengdu, Zigong, Shenyang, and Shanghai where she has explored Qing tax reform and state-building, elite formation, business organization and investment, and the development of early modern customary law governing private transactions. Her publications include The Magistrate's Tael, Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch'ing China (1984), Rainbow (1992), a co-edited volume, Contract and Property Rights in Early Modern China (2004) and The Merchants Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China. Professor Zelin is currently working on a project with Jonathan Ocko, tentatively entitled Contract Law and Civil Procedure in Qing and Republican China: A Text-Based Approach as well as an exploration of the sources of Chinese legal consciousness in the Qing and Republican periods.

[Photos of Zigong, Sichuan, home of the Furong Salt Yard]