Rate My Professor Ya Zuo

Ya Zuo is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair (2024-2025) in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of middle and late imperial China whose highly interdisciplinary work crosses subfields including intellectual history, the history of science, technology, and medicine, the history of emotions, gender studies, sensory history, and the history of the book. Her broad perspective illuminates ideas and knowledge in pre-modern China. Zuo holds a B.A. in History from Peking University and a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, where she received fellowships such as the 2011 Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Doctoral Fellowship and the 2010 Ph.D. Writing Completion Fellowship. At UCSB, she teaches courses including HIST 184B History of China (sixth to seventeenth centuries), HIST 184T History of Traditional Chinese Thought, HIST 184R History of Chinese Medicine, HIST 2B World History, HIST 80 Chinese Civilization, and HIST 201C Emotions in History: Multidisciplinary Approaches.

Zuo's first monograph, Shen Gua’s Empiricism (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), provides the first book-length study in English of Shen Gua, the celebrated medieval Chinese polymath and author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, alongside an exploration of empiricism rooted in Neo-Confucian theory of knowledge. A Chinese edition, Shen Kuo de zhishi shiji, appeared from Zhonghua Book Company in 2024. Notable articles include “Male Tears in Song China (960–1279)” (Journal of Chinese Studies, 2021), “Collecting Tears: Lachrymation and Emotions in the Taiping Collectanea” (Oriens Extremus, 2022), “Wailing Barbarians and Bloody Tears: Affect and Self-Other Imagination in Medieval Eastern Eurasia” (The Chinese Historical Review, 2025), and “The Chickpea in Premodern China: A Perpetual Foreigner in the Central Lands” (Journal of Chinese History, 2026). She is completing a monograph on tears and crying in Chinese history. Zuo has earned the 2023-2024 Stanford University Humanities Center Fellowship, 2020-2021 UCSB Regents’ Humanities Faculty Fellowship, 2020 ACLS/Henry Luce Foundation grant, and 2019 Elizabeth Watkins Porter Research Award. She serves as President of the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies and contributes to edited volumes and journals.