Li Chen received his JD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Law (magna cum laude) and PhD in History from Columbia University. He is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies and the Graduate Department of History. Professor Chen holds a non-budgetary cross-appointment at the Faculty of Law at the rank of Associate Professor. Focusing on the intersections of law, culture, and politics, Professor Chen’s research and teaching interests include late Imperial and modern China (15th through 20th centuries), Chinese law and society, Sino-Western relations, law and empire, history of science and biopower in jurisprudence, politics of translation, cultural encounters, international law, global history, and postcolonial studies.
His first monograph, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia University Press, 2016), won the 2018 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History. Professor Chen is co-editor of Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice, and Transformation, 1530s-1950s (Brill, 2015) (with Madeleine Zelin), and Pathways of Scholarship: Reflective and Methodological Conversations with International Scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences (in Chinese) (Shangwu yinshuguan, 2023). He is also author of a Chinese book, Law, Knowledge, and Power in the Age of Empire (Shangwu yinshuguan, 2024) and expects to complete a SSHRC-funded English monograph in fall 2024, entitled Invisible Power and Technocratic Governance: Legal Specialists and Juridical Capital in Late Imperial China, 1651-1911. Professor Chen is a member of the editorial board of the Law and History Review (since 2013), Law & Social Inquiry, and Journal of World History. He was the founding president (2014-2017) and current director of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. He served as Associate Chair (2015-2016) and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies (2016-2019).
For more information on Professor Chen’s research, see his academia.edu page: utoronto.academia.edu/LiChen and the U of T Department of History website.
