Bryna Goodman is a professor of Chinese history at the University of Oregon. Professor Goodman received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MA and PhD from Stanford University. She has been awarded fellowships from ACLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Oregon Humanities Center and visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Institut d’Asie Orientale (Lyon), and Academia Sinica (Taipei). She is the author of Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (University of California Press, 1995) and a coeditor of Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) and Twentieth-century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World (Routledge, 2012).
Professor Goodman’s talk examined early 20th century Chinese ideas of finance capitalism in the context of the 1921 speculative bubble in Shanghai. In China, the social integration of Western economic science and the financial institutions it naturalized was telescoped into a few short decades–a process that took considerably more than a century in Europe. In this context, the failures of the new financial institutions, like the failures of the new Chinese republic, raised questions of culture and history that continue to haunt the new economic science.
Photo credit: Tony Rinaldo
