Academic Articles

I study the global histories of imperialism, religion, and medicine — above all the connections between Europe and China from the nineteenth century to the present.

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The Quackery Question in Imperial Germany, forthcoming in Past & Present.

In the decades before the First World War, German physicians, bureaucrats, and legislators became preoccupied with the "quackery question" (Kurpfuscherfrage): state licensing had consolidated their authority without persuading patients to prefer credentialed care. Testimonials, promotional pamphlets, and petitions to the Kaiser show working-class and middle-class consumers alike making reasoned choices about whom to trust — evidence, the article contends, of the limits of expertise in a modern, mobile society.

Grains of Truth': Johannes Schütte, Decolonization, and Catholic Reform, 1939-1965, Church History, 2026.

Imprisoned and expelled from China as an agent of Western imperialism, Johannes Schütte came to concede what he called "grains of truth" in Communist critiques of the missionary enterprise. A decade later he helped draft Ad Gentes, the Second Vatican Council's decree on mission, which turned that admission of failure into a programme: a Church that takes root in local cultures rather than reproducing Western forms.

Superstition and Statecraft in Late Qing China, Past & Present, 2022.

Late Qing diplomat-scholars, writing home from postings in Europe and America, defended the very customs Western observers dismissed as “superstition” — some to shield them from Western influence, others to mobilize them against empire. In this piece, I argue that Chinese anti-superstition campaigns have to be read as a global story.

The Quest for an “Indigenous Church”: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Indigenization Debates of the 1920s, American Historical Review, 2017.

German missionaries and Chinese Christians made common cause around the "indigenous church" — a useful weapon against Anglo-American dominance of the mission field — while meaning irreconcilable things by it: orthodox Lutheranism for the Germans, freedom from Europe's denominational quarrels for the Chinese. The piece treats indigenization as one of the 1920s' great contested concepts, alongside its Communist and liberal-internationalist rivals.

Forever a Patriot: Chinese Christians and the Repudiation of American Liberal Protestantism, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2017.

The Chinese theologian Xie Fuya defended American liberal Protestantism in the 1920s and repudiated it by the 1970s, calling instead for a Christianity free of any Western influence. His career measures both the global reach of American liberal theology and the terms of its rejection.

And here are some other articles of mine grouped by theme.

And here are some other articles of mine grouped by theme.