Ying Zhang

Class of Fall 2022

Associate Professor of History

Ohio State University

Confucians and Confinement: Imprisoned Officials in Ming China (1368-1644)

Zhang’s Academy project, “Confucians and Confinement: Imprisoned Officials in Ming China (1368-1644),” is the first book-length study of the imprisoned officials and prison culture in pre-modern China. During the Ming period, an unusually high number of officials were imprisoned for job-related investigations or political reasons; both the incarcerated and those who took care of them left accounts of their experiences. Zhang considers the details of everyday prison life as well as the actions of their families, friends, and sympathizers. Examining thousands of cases of imprisonment in the Ming dynasty, her book treats the prison space as a fluid site to explore the entanglement of legal practice, bureaucratic management, political struggle, and personal negotiation. Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarship of Prison Studies, Zhang takes a new approach to understanding the Chinese bureaucratic tradition by illustrating its social and cultural contexts. “Additionally, by situating imprisonment in the history of medicine, family, and material culture, the book will significantly enrich the comparative history of prisons by not only offering an in-depth study of a pre-modern Chinese case but also suggesting new ways to illuminate the nature and impact of incarceration in our own world,” she writes. In Berlin, Zhang plans to work with colleagues in early modern Chinese science and material culture at the Freie Universität, Staatsbibliothek, and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Ying Zhang is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University who focuses on premodern Chinese political institutions, religion, literary culture, and gender studies. Her current research examines the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and society in the Ming dynasty. Zhang completed her BA at the Renmin University of China, MA at the Osaka Prefecture University (Japan) and the University of Cincinnati, and PhD at the University of Michigan. She is author of Confucian Image Politics: Masculine Morality in Seventeenth-Century China (Washington, 2016) and Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368-1644): Creative Environment, Creative Subjects (Brill Research Perspectives series, 2020). Zhang’s writing has appeared in Intellectual History, Feminist Studies, Late Imperial China, and the American Historical Review, and her work has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, among others.