Brett Sheehan

I am a professor of Modern Chinese history at the University of Southern California, but teaching is actually my second career. I turned to academics after obtaining a degree in Finance and spending six years working as a commercial banker. I enjoyed the business world, but found my true avocation as a teacher. As a professor, I have been able to combine my finance background with both my research and teaching which focus on the business history of China and East Asia.

My work looks at the nature of Chinese capitalism through the intersection of business and economy with social, political, and cultural phenomena.

My new book, Industrial Eden, follows one capitalist family through five successive authoritarian regimes across the twentieth century. It was inspired by Roberta Sung who my wife met when we were living in Berkeley and who told us stories about her father's remarkable career. In chasing her father's story, I discovered a window through which we could see Chinese capitalism over the course of China's turbulent modern history.

My first book, Trust in Troubled Times, looks at the effect of financial crises on state-society relations in China. The topic was inspired by a passage in David Strand's Rickshaw Beijing where he described merchants being marched through the streets with signs around their necks because they refused to accept certain kinds of bank notes. Clearly money and banking had a dramatic place in urban society at the time and I wanted to find out more.

In addition, I have written chapters on a variety of topics in the other books listed on this page. Four of these look at republican China in the first half of the twentieth century: In Remaking the Chinese City, I have a chapter on the cosmopolitan nature of bankers' urban identities, in Cities in Motion, I write about the nature of urban networks, in Everyday Modernity, I discuss the "modern" nature of bank accounts for small savers, and in New Narratives of Urban Space, I look at a group of small-time forgers in Beijing. I call it "Unorganized Crime." In a fifth chapter in Capitalist Dilemma, I tell the story of one capitalist's "Shotgun Wedding" to the Communist Party in the very early years of the People's Republic of China.

Every year one of my favorite activities is taking a group of USC students to China to study consumer culture as part of USC's Global East Asia program. I make it a point to take students off the beaten track, as well as showing them the sights in Beijing and Shanghai. This year we visited a rural village in Henan province and it was a real eye-opening experience for the students.

I divide my time between Los Angeles and Shanghai. In Los Angeles, I live as resident faculty at USC's Parkside International Residential College. Most of our residents are first-year students and being surrounded by smart and engaged young people is a daily joy. Shanghai is my home away from home, where I spend the summers and work on my research.

Over the years, my students have coined a variety of nicknames for me: brofessor, #papasheehan, and the thesis-whisperer - to name a few.