• PhD in History, Yale, 1971
• AB in Public and International Affairs, Princeton, 1964

Chinese cultural, political, and social history; Chinese myth, history, and historiography; the founding and consolidation of the Qing dynasty; Chinese history and civilization in comparative and global perspectives

Current Research
Myth and history in the founding of the Qing dynasty with particular reference to the central plain

• At Buffalo: Research associate in the Baldy Center of the Law School; Chair, Asian Studies Advisory Council, College of Arts and Sciences.
• At Harvard; associate of the Fairbank Center and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
• In China: associate of the Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, and Institute of History, Henan Academy of Social Sciences, Zhengzhou; visiting professor at Sichuan Normal University, Nanchong, and Research Associate of the Center for Yellow River Civilization and Sustainable Development, Henan University, Kaifen, 2006-.

• Chinese Walls in Time and Space: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Roger Des Forges, Minglu Gao, Liu Chiao-Mei, Haun Saussy, with Thomas Burkman. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2010.
• “Tales of Three City Walls in China’s Central Plain,” Chapter 2 in Roger Des Forges, Minglu Gao, Liu Chiao-mei, and Haun Saussy, eds., “Chinese Walls in Time and Space: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective.”
• Time and Space in Chinese Historiography: Concepts of Centrality in the History and Literature of the Three Kingdoms,? in The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography, Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer, eds. (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007): 210-232.
• The Asian World, 600-1500, co-authored with John S. Major (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
• “Toward Another Tang or Zhou? Views from the Central Plain in the Shunzhi Reign,” in Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition: East Asia from Ming to Qing, Lynn A. Struve, ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005): 73-112.
• Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);
• (with Luo Xu), “China as a Non- Hegemonic Superpower?: The Uses of History among the China Can Say No Writers and Their Critics,” Critical Asian Studies, 33.4 (December 2001): 483-507;
• “States, Societies, and Civil Societies in Chinese History,” in Timothy Brook and Bernard Frolic, eds., Civil Society in China (Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997): 68-95;
• with Luo Ning and Wu Yenbo, co-editors, Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989: Chinese and American Reflections (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993);
• The Legend of Li Yen: Its Origins andImplications for the Transition from Ming to Ch’ing in Seventeenth Century China, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 104.3 (1984): 411-36;
• “The Story of Li Yen: Its Growth and Function from the Early Ch’ing to the Present,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 42.2 (1982): 535-587
• Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution (Yale, 1973)

• UB Council on International Studies and Programs award for outstanding contributions to international education, 2007
• Several articles published in Chinese in leading scholarly journals in the PRC and the ROC, 1985-1994;
• Second place in Porter Prize for doctoral dissertation closest to publication, Yale, 1971
• Herrick Prize for outstanding senior thesis in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton, 1964