How I Wrote a Book about the Gods of Mount Tai (China, 1000-2000)

Susan Naquin’s 2022 book Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, covers a thousand years, speaks to issues in history, religion, and art, and took her more than twenty years to produce. In her talk, she will describe the different kinds of sources and methods that she combined in this research. She will also reflect on the grave dangers, practical and intellectual, of allowing a book project to take so long.

Susan Naquin works on the social and cultural history of late imperial and early modern China (1400-1900). She earned her B.A. from Stanford (1966), Ph.D. in History from Yale (1974), and taught at the University of Pennsylvania between 1977 and 1992. She came to Princeton in 1993 as a member of both the Department of History and Department of East Asian Studies(Link is external) (Link opens in new window). She has been Professor Emerita since 2013.

Professor Naquin dabbles in the history of collecting, but her research interests continue to be on material culture and artisanal technologies within the religious world of northern China in the Ming and Qing periods.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies