He received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 2016 and concentrates broadly on the environmental, social, and legal history of the Qing Empire (1644-1912). His current research project, tentatively titled “Stolen Land and Broken Bodies: Law, Environment, and Rebellion in Northwest China,” examines ground-level social transformations and the ethnicized legal disputes that both triggered and followed the violence of the mid-nineteenth century. Centering on the lives of ordinary peddlers, smallholders, and herders preserved in legal case records and a range of other local sources, the study details the changing jurisdictional geographies and disputes over land, resources, and individual bodies that attended imperial expansion in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. His work has been supported by, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Program.