Carl Kubler Receives Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship

Carnegie Mellon University’s Carl Kubler has been named one of 14 Luce/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Early Career Fellows in China Studies. An expert on modern China and peoples of Chinese descent, Kubler is an assistant professor in Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of History.

Kubler’s project, “Beyond Conflict: Global Trade and Everyday Relations Between China and the West, 1780-1860,” examines the history of trade and grassroots relations among Chinese people, Europeans and Americans on the South China Coast in the decades surrounding the first Opium War (1839 to 1842). This project will culminate in a book and is based on Kubler’s doctoral dissertation, which won the 2022-2023 World History Association Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in world, global or transnational history.

“I’m looking forward to the opportunity to conduct further archival research in Macao and Taiwan with the support of the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship,” Kubler said.

Through a bottom-up reassessment of the daily lives and incentives of merchants, sailors, interpreters, coolies, cooks, sex workers and other individuals, Kubler pushes back against traditional narratives of Sino-Western conflict and shows that active transnational problem-solving and cooperation, not conflict, were in fact the norm. By highlighting these processes of negotiation and relationship building, this research revises scholarly understandings of 19th-century China and offers a more sensitive understanding of how people from different parts of the world engaged across cultural and national divides.

“Beyond Conflict” marks the third time that Kubler’s work is receiving support from the Henry Luce Foundation and ACLS. He previously received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2021 and Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in Chinese Studies Predissertation Summer Travel Grant in 2017. 

Kubler received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 2022 and his bachelor’s degree from Yale University. He joined CMU’s faculty in 2023.