In 2007, Perry was named director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, effective July 1, 2008.[9] In January 2024, James Robson was announced as her successor.[10]
Scholarship and views
Perry's research focuses on the history of the Chinese Communist Revolution and its implications for contemporary politics. Although she earned all her degrees in political science, much of her research focuses on history and its links to contemporary issues. She observes that contemporary China consciously sees itself as an outgrowth of its long history, and Chinese political leaders are keenly aware of history, even if they may misunderstand it. As a result, history is highly consequential in the study of contemporary politics.[4]
She had been sympathetic with the Cultural Revolution as a student, and joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group that opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War. After witnessing the inequality in Communist China and hearing people's personal accounts about their suffering during the period, her views on the Chinese Communist Revolution and Maoism changed fundamentally.[4]
Her book, Shanghai on Strike: the Politics of Chinese Labor (1993) won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association. Her article "From Mencius to Mao – and Now: Chinese Conceptions of Socioeconomic Rights" (2008) won the Heinz Eulau Prize from the American Political Science Association. Perry received honorary doctorate degrees from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The Asian Studies Library at her undergraduate alma mater has been named in her honor. She also holds honorary professorships at eight major Chinese universities.
Publications
Selected books
Perry, Elizabeth J. (1980), Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945, Stanford University Press)
Edited. Chinese Perspectives on the Nien Rebellion (M.E. Sharpe, 1981)
Edited with Christine Wong. The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China (Harvard, 1985)
Edited with Jeffrey N Wasserstrom. Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (Westview, 1992)
Shanghai on Strike (Stanford, 1993)
Edited with Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus and Barry Naughton. Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Chinese Cities (Cambridge, 1995)
Edited. Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia (UC Berkeley, 1996)
With Li Xun. Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Westview, 1997)
Edited with Xiaobo Lu. Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (M.E. Sharpe, 1997)
Edited with Mark Selden. Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance (Routledge, 2000)
Edited with Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, Doug McAdam, William H. Sewell, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilley. Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2001)
Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (M.E. Sharpe, 2002)
Edited with Merle Goldman. Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Harvard, 2002)
Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship and the Chinese State (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005)
Edited with Merle Goldman. Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China (Harvard, 2007)
Edited with Sebastian Heilmann. Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governanace in China (Harvard, 2011)
———; Li, Xun (2003), "Revolutionary Rudeness: The Language of Red Guards and Rebel Workers in China's Cultural Revolution", in Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. (ed.), Twentieth Century China, London; New York: Routledge
^ abElizabeth J. Perry (Pei Yili) (2016-10-24). "我的老师蔡少卿,一位中国顶尖的社会史学家" [My teacher Cai Shaoqing, a top Chinese scholar of social history]. The Paper. Retrieved 2020-01-29.