Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker Collegiate Professor of Chinese Studies and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor
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Miranda Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 2002. An amateur cook and the daughter of a southern Chinese immigrant, she takes her food and food history seriously. She is a cultural historian of China, whose primary interests lie in recipes of all kinds: culinary and medical. She has published numerous articles on various aspects of Chinese medical, culinary, and cultural history in English and Chinese. She is also the author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China (2007) and, with the late Conrad Schirokauer, the co-author of A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (2012). She is now writing a book on the history of dairy in China before the twentieth century, a topic that has received scant attention in the West. In 2019, an essay from that project, “Mr. Song’s Cheeses, South China, 1368-1644,” will be published in Gastronomica.
She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on various aspects of Asian history, including ASIAN 258: Food and Drink of Asia. She mentors graduate students through the teaching of advanced seminars as well as through active collaboration on research projects. The seminars include ASIAN 535: History of Chinese Science, and ASIAN 585: Historical Studies of Food in China.
You can follow her food travels through China on Twitter at Miranda Brown@Dong_Muda.
