Gavin Healy

Office hours: M 10am-12 noon
E-mail: gh148@columbia.edu

Educational Background

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

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: China
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia

Research Interests

History of Late Imperial/Modern China, Cold War in Asia, Comparative Labor History, Tourism History,
History and Cinema Gavin Healy is a historian of modern China. In addition to his teaching at Columbia, he is a Center
Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His book, A
Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests, 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. Prior to his work
as a historian, he practiced law in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul for ten years.

 

Selected Publications

A Guide to Mao’s China: Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests (Cornell University Press, 2026).
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501785900/a-guide-to-maos-china/#bookTabs=1

“Michelangelo Antonioni, Tourist Snapshots, and the Politics of the ‘Backward Scene’ in 1970s China,”
Journal of Contemporary History 59, no. 4 (October 2024): 732-753.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00220094241271006

“Fuwuyuan on Film: Cinema, Socialist Education, and Service Labor from the Great Leap Forward to
Reform and Opening Up,” Modern China 50, no. 2 (March 2024): 200-230.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00977004231170526

“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.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2021.0005