Concubinage and Motherhood in Qing China (1644–1911): Ritual, Law, and Custodial Rights of Property

Yue Du is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at New York University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Parenthood and the State in China, 1644-1949: Law, Ritual, and State-Building.” “Parenthood and the State in China” explores how state-sponsored filiality shaped China’s transition from empire to nation-state, engaging the broader issue of how a nation-state established its own legitimacy simultaneously as an ideological antithesis and a political heir to the empire it replaced. She has recently published “Legal Justice in Eighteenth-century Mongolia: Gender, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Manchu-Mongol Marriage Alliance” in Late Imperial China. Her dissertation and her other research interests form part of a larger research agenda that aims to advance scholarly understandings of the legacy early modern China passed on to modern China and its relationship with the radical changes China went through during the twentieth century, particularly in the context of law, gender, and politics.