Gavin Healy

Lecturer, Early Career Fellow

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University
JD: Columbia University School of Law
MA: Chinese University of Hong Kong
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Intro to East Asian Civ: China
EEAS G6991 MA Thesis Writing

Research Interests

Late Imperial/Modern China, Cold War in Asia, Comparative Labor History, Tourism
History

Gavin Healy is a historian of modern China. His current book project, “The Political and
Cultural Economy of Sightseeing: Foreign Tourism in the ‘New China’ (1949-1978),”
examines how personnel within China’s state tourism bureaucracy struggled to balance
the use of tourism as a form of political, historical, and cultural representation with the
demands of developing a revenue-generating service industry in a socialist economy. His
research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research
Council, the American Historical Association, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Before entering Columbia’s PhD program in Chinese history, he practiced law in New
York, Hong Kong, and Seoul for ten years.

Selected Publications

Touring the Socialist World: The Political and Cultural Economy of China’s Outbound
Tourism, 1956-1965,” Twentieth-Century China 46, no. 1 (January 2021): 83-102.