Eleanor Joanna Waley-Cohen (born 10 June 1952) is an English academic who is Silver Professor of History at New York University, where she has taught Chinese history since 1992. She served as Provost of New York University Shanghai from 2014 to 2025, the University's chief academic officer, setting the university's academic strategy and priorities, and overseeing academic appointments, research, and faculty affairs.

Her research interests include early modern Chinese history, especially the Qing dynasty; China and the West; and Chinese imperial culture, especially in the Qianlong era; warfare in China and Inner Asia; Chinese culinary history.

Early life

Waley-Cohen was born in 1952 at Westminster Hospital in London, the daughter of Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen, Baronet and Hon. Joyce Nathan. She was born into a prominent Anglo-Jewish family, the granddaughter of Sir Robert Waley Cohen and Lord Nathan.

Her 2003 article "New Qing History" summarized American revisionist scholarship in history of the Qing dynasty and gave it the name New Qing History which has come into widespread use.

Bibliography

  • The Culture of War in China; Empire and Military in the Eighteenth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2006)
  • 'Chinese Taste' in Food: A History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006)
  • 'The New Qing History' in Radical History Review, Winter 2003
  • 'Military Ritual and the Qing Empire' in N. di Cosmo, ed., Warfare in Inner Asian History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002) 405–444
  • The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999; paperback, 2000; French translation 2002)
  • 'War and Empire-Building in Eighteenth-Century China' in International History Review (special issue on Manchu imperialism) XX. 3 (June 1998), 336–352
  • 'A Brief History of Hong Kong', in Picturing Hong Kong, 1842-1910 (New York: Asia Society, 1997), 15–26
  • Commemorating War in Eighteenth-Century China (Modern Asian Studies 30.4)
  • 'China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century' in American Historical Review 98.5 (December 1993) 1525–1544
  • Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991)

References

  • Waley-Cohen, Joanna WorldCat Authority page.
  • Joanna Waley-Cohen Library of Congress Authority Page.
  • New York University Shanghai (2026), Joanna Waley-Cohen