PULLMAN, Wash. — David Pietz, assistant professor of history at Washington State University, has received a Mellon Fellowship to attend the Needham research Institute at Cambridge during spring semester 2005.
Pietz plans to use the resources at the Needham Institute to research how water management after 1949 fits into the context of traditional Chinese resource management. “My work at Cambridge will center on my current book project,” Pietz said. “In particular, this project entails a comparative environmental history of the Huai River valley in central China. The comparative part comes into play as I look at the respective paradigms of the Maoist era.”
Pietz received a doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998 and joined WSU’s history department in August 2002. He teaches China and East Asia history. His current research focuses on 20th century Chinese economic and environmental history. In 1996, the Committee on Undergraduate Education at Harvard University recognized Pietz with a Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching.
Pietz’s recent publications include “Engineering the State: The Huai River and Reconstruction in Nationalist China, 1927-37” (2002), and he is co-editor of “State and Economy in Republican China” (2000).
