Yiyun Peng

Yiyun (pronounced "ee-yueen") Peng is a PhD candidate who successfully defended her dissertation* on May 1st, 2023 in the Department of History at Cornell University. Her research interests include environmental history, 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, environmental, technological, 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. 

Dissertation title: The Herbaceous Economy: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970

* Which just received the 2023 Messenger Chalmers Prize.