Yiyun (pronounced "ee-yueen")听Peng is a PhD candidate who successfully defended her dissertation* on May听1st, 2023 in the Department of History at Cornell University.听Her research interests include听environmental history,听the history of technology, and economic history in China, Asia as well as in the global context. Her dissertation explores the ways in which the spread of cash crops (including indigo, tobacco, ramie, and bamboo) and the development of handicraft industries that processed the crops into popular commodities profoundly changed the economic,听environmental,听technological,听and political configurations in upland Southeast China from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Her second project works on ramie as a global history that explores various ways in which people came to know, grow, and process this fiber-producing plant in different parts of the world, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the US, and Europe, and the spread and exchange of knowledge and technology.听
Dissertation title:听The Herbaceous Economy: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970
* Which just received the 2023 Messenger Chalmers Prize.
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