Teaching
As a professor of history at Rhodes College, I get to share my interest in Asia with an engaged and informed community of students. In our examination of the societies of China, Japan and Korea, my goal is to encourage a sensitivity to cultural differences while still emphasizing the universality of the human experience. History is key to understanding and successfully engaging this increasingly important region and its peoples—whether considering Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, North Korea’s threat of nuclear weapons, or China’s booming economy, the past illuminates the present. 

Research
While my interests in the region are broad, I am especially attracted to issues of identity and what it means to be Chinese. We tend to see China as monolithic and its people as homogenous, but that is certainly not how they see themselves. According to the PRC government, fifty-six ethnic groups combine to form the Chinese nation, but the Han constitute China’s overwhelming majority. The Han officially comprise over ninety percent of China’s population and they number in excess of one billion, the largest ethnic group on earth and twenty percent of the world’s population. But what exactly makes one “Han,” and how is this different from being Chinese? Questioning the putative authenticity of this official category, my research critically examines the origins of the Han myth, how it has evolved over time, and its variations from region to region.

Related to this question, I have recently become interested in the field of anthropology in China and its role in defining the Chinese people. In 2005 as a Fulbright fellow, and again last summer as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, I had the opportunity to investigate the history of archaeology in China and the role archaeologists played in pioneering museums and cultural property law as part of China’s modernization project in the 1920s. At present I am drafting a book manuscript that explores this history.

Visit my personal website at http://www.claytonbrown.org.

Selected Publications
“Li Ji: Father of Chinese Archaeology,” Orientations v. 39, no. 3 (April 2008).

“Taiping Revolt,” World History Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2010). [forthcoming in April]

The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth Century China, by Sigrid Schmalzer, The China Journal no. 63 (forthcoming January 2010).

“Xia Nai yu Li Ji,” Gu jin lun heng [Disquisitions on the Past and Present]  v. 20 (Dec. 2009). Chinese-language article forthcoming from the Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology. Co-authored with Liu Wensuo, Professor of Archaeology at Zhongshan University.