Tristan Brown

Tristan G. Brown is a historian of late imperial (“early modern”) China whose research examines how law, science, religion, and the environment shaped Chinese society from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. His first book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton University Press, 2023), explores the role of cosmology in law during a period of economic and environmental transformation. It received the John K. Fairbank Award from the American Historical Association, the Biennial Book Prize from the International Society for Chinese Law and History, and was named a Choice Outstanding Title.

Building on this work, his current projects expand his multilingual research in two directions: a social history of Islam in Ming China (1368–1644) and an environmental-military history of the strategic use of ice along China’s northern frontier. He is also Co-PI on an ongoing interdisciplinary project, supported by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, examining the complexity of legal language across cultures, including Chinese. Alongside these projects, he has edited special issues of History of Humanities and Journal of History of Science and Technology, and has published widely on law, environment, and society, with articles appearing in or forthcoming from the American Historical Review, T’oung Pao, Late Imperial China, Journal of Chinese History, Comparativ, and Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions.

Brown has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, St John’s College, Cambridge, and Stanford University, with additional research support from the British Academy, ACLS, SSRC, the Henry Luce Foundation, and others. He is also an elected member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

At MIT, he teaches “Dynastic China” in the fall and “Modern China” in the spring, as well as the seminar “Nature and Environment in China.” His courses connect the deep past to urgent questions of climate, law, and society, inviting students to use Chinese history as a lens on today’s global challenges.