Feng Li

Professor of Early Chinese History and Archaeology

Office: 422 Kent
Office Hours: R 4-6 PM
Phone: (212) 854-2510
Email: fl123@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Institute of Archaeology (’86)
PhD: University of Chicago (’00)

Research Interests

Early Chinese Archaeology, Bronze-Age Cultures, Early Imperialisms, History of Literacy

Professor Li received his MA from the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He also did Ph.D. work in the University of Tokyo (1991). He is both a historian of Early China specializing in bronze inscriptions of the Shang-Zhou period, and an active field archaeologist. His past work has addressed the complex relationship between geography and political processes in the collapse of a prominent Bronze-Age state, and the performance of the earliest bureaucracy in China and the nature of the early Chinese state. Professor Li’s work engages both epigraphic-textual and material evidence and offers question-led interpretations of Bronze-Age society and culture in comparative frameworks. He directed Columbia’s first archaeological field project in China in 2006-2011. In recent years, he is undertaking the writing of the Economic History of Late Bronze-Age China (ca. 1000-500 BC). He founded and co-chaired the Columbia Early China Seminar in 2002-2012, and is co-editor of Tang Center Series in Early China. See his personal website for a fuller list of publications.

Selected English (and bilingual) language Publications:

Guicheng: A Study of the Formation of States on the Jiaodong Peninsula in Late Bronze-Age China, 1000-500 BCE (chief co-editor, Science Press, 2018).

Early China: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, 2014)

Writing and Literacy in Early China (co-editor; UW Press, 2013)

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (Cambridge, 2008)

Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045-771 BC (Cambridge, 2006)