Laura Hostetler is a professor in the Department of History in the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the Universi ...

. Her principal research interests are the history of cartography, empire, and encounters between

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

Asia Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...

. She belongs to the

school of thought A school of thought, or intellectual tradition, is the perspective of a group of people who share common characteristics of opinion or outlook of a philosophy, discipline, belief, social movement, economics, cultural movement, or art movement. ...

known as the

New Qing History The New Qing History (, sometimes abbreviated as ''NQH'') is a historiographical school that gained prominence in the United States in the mid-1990s by offering a major revision of history of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China. Overview The Qin ...

. Her book, ''Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China'', demonstrates how the

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

pursued its imperial ambitions by using

cartography Cartography (; from , 'papyrus, sheet of paper, map'; and , 'write') is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an imagined reality) can ...

and

ethnography Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...

. In 1995 she received her Ph.D. in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

, where she studied with Susan Naquin. From 2010 to 2014, Hostetler was the Chair of the UIC Department of History. Hostetler is also a Council Member for the

American Historical Association The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world, claiming over 10,000 members. Founded in 1884, AHA works to protect academic free ...

Publications

*''Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China'', University of Chicago Press, 2001. *''The Art of Ethnography: A Miao Album of Guizhou Province'', University of Washington Press, 2005.

References

American sinologists Historians of China 21st-century American historians University of Illinois faculty University of Pennsylvania alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-historian-stub