In Memoriam: Harriet Zurndorfer (1946-2026)
Harriet Zurndorfer passed away on 18 March 2026 in Leiden.
Harriet arrived at Berkeley to study Chinese history in the late 1960s. Her supervisor, Frederic Wakeman, would go on to have a major influence on the trajectory of her academic career. On Wakeman’s suggestion, Harriet spent time in Cambridge to study with Denis Twitchett and in Japan with Shiba Yoshinobu. During these formative years, she became interested in combining the Braudelian longue durée approach with a regional focus on Huizhou, which led to her 1977 thesis entitled ‘Merchant and clansman in a local setting in medieval China: a case study of the Fan Clan of Hsiu-ning Hsien, Hui-chou, 800-1600’. The book based on her thesis was entitled Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of Hui-Chou Prefecture 800 to 1800, published by Brill in 1989. Christian Lamouroux, who reviewed the work in the 1995 issue of Annales, described her presentation of evidence as brilliant and seductive. Importantly, in this review, Lamouroux raised further questions about the study of lineages and the place of local history in the study of empire.[1] Harriet’s Huizhou book and Lamouroux’s questions would go on to inspire several generations of scholars working on Huizhou, on lineages and on local history.
The history of the Ming dynasty remained an important anchor in Harriet’s work throughout the many decades of her scholarship. She described herself in the first place as a social historian. Ming history mattered to her because she saw the Ming as central for understanding the underlying structures of imperial China. During the 1980s, when she was teaching in Leiden and revising her thesis into a book, the study of the Ming was undergoing major changes; new studies on Wang Yangming, on Christianity as a local religion, on urbanization and on art and material culture made the Ming dynasty the most dynamic period to study. From a first Ming-focused article published in T’oung Pao in 1980 to a study of human trafficking and piracy in Ming China in Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2023, the Ming dynasty remained central to Harriet’s research.
Another major change of the 1980s was the arrival of scholarly studies on women and gender in the China field. In the United States, scholars like Dorothy Ko, Susan Mann and Ellen Widmer were the first to study women not through the writings of men but the literary output of women, first made accessible by the publication of Hu Wenkai 胡文楷’s Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歴代婦女箸作考 (1985). Harriet made significant contributions to this field through her own publications, by organizing a major conference in Leiden on the subject in 1996, leading to the publication of an edited volume entitled Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (Brill, 1999) and the founding of Nannü, the journal she founded in 1999 and for which she served as Editor-in-Chief until her death. The journal, initially covering imperial China, would soon be expanded to publish articles on modern Chinese history as well. Under Harriet’s leadership, Nannü remained the most significant China-focused, international, interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of men, women and gender in the China field.
From the mid-1990s until 2000, Harriet also served as managing editor for the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. Published continuously since 1958, JESHO features research on the Middle East and Central Asia, South, Southeast, East Asia and Africa—the ‘Orient’ in its most expansive sense—and the task might have seemed daunting to a lesser scholar, but Harriet thrived in this role, and undoubtedly the experience helped her in founding Nannü.
In the 2000s, when she was no longer actively teaching at Leiden, she became an active participant in the Leverhulme Global Economic History Network founded by the British economic historian Patrick O’Brien. This network, GEHN for short, was inspired by Kenneth Pomeranz’s 2000 publication The Great Divergence, and reoriented economic history away from its Eurocentric foundations towards Asia. Harriet’s expertise on Chinese economic history, for example through her work on the cotton industry in China, was extremely valuable for the success of this network.
Her many strengths included not only her lifelong dedication to China Studies, seen for example in the many book reviews and state-of-the-field articles she wrote over her lifetime, but her commitment to fostering the careers of students and younger scholars. Without her encouragement, China specialists at Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Warwick may never have entered graduate school. Those who took her classes on Chinese history and what was in Leiden called ‘Apparaat’ (the study of sinological tools and methods) remember her as strict but fair. Her book China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present, based on her years of experience in teaching this class, was published by Brill in 1995 and used in graduate classes worldwide.
Harriet was University Lecturer at the Sinology Department (now LIAS China Studies) from 1978 to 2004 and Senior Research Scholar at the Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian studies (defunct) from 2004 to 2011. After retirement, she continued to be an active presence at research seminars in Leiden, in area studies, history and sociology. She contributed chapters to edited volumes including The Cambridge Economic History of China and Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900, and edited the Cambridge World History of Violence. In her final years, she became interested in the exploits of a Florentine merchant who circumnavigated the globe in the late 1590s. She published an article on his travels in China and Southeast Asia, which brought her back to the topic of gender and sexuality, and was at work on a monograph about the global past of the great city of Florence. Her presence will be greatly missed in Leiden and elsewhere.
[1] Christian Lamouroux, ‘Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History. The Development of Hui-chou Prefecture 800 to 1800’, Annales 50, no. 2 (1995): 429–32.