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Department of History

Dan Knorr

Assistant Professor
History
Office
SCH Schroeder Hall 301
Office Hours
Schroeder Hall 319
Wednesdays 1:30–2:30
Thursdays 9:30–10:30
Or by appointment
Office Phone
(309) 438-5641office
phone
Email
ddknorr@ilstu.eduemail
  • About
  • Education
  • Research

Biography

My research and teaching focus on the early modern and modern periods of Chinese history, particularly the relationship between local communities and the state, urban history, and translocal mobility. World historical perspectives are an important component of both my teaching and my research, shaping how I look at historical problems through a comparative framework and how I examine global currents and local and narratives in light of each other.

I received my PhD from the University of Chicago and worked as a Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences there in 2020. I taught in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University from 2021 to 2024 and was a fellow at Robinson College. I hold master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of California, Irvine and completed my undergraduate study at Johns Hopkins University. I also attended the Inter-University Program for Chinese language study in 2010–11. I received a Fulbright fellowship to support research in China in 2016–17.

Current Courses

200.002Doing History: An Introduction

104.001History Of East Asia

104.003History Of East Asia

275.001History Of Japanese Civilization

300.003Senior Seminar In History

Teaching Interests & Areas

East Asia; early modern and modern China; world history; empires and political culture

PhD History

University of Chicago

MA History

University of California, Irvine

Bachelor of Arts History and East Asian Studies

Johns Hopkins University

Book Review

Daniel Knorr, Review of Ma Guang, Rupture, Evolution, and Continuity: The Shandong Peninsula in East Asian Maritime History during the Yuan-Ming Transition, China and Asia 5, no. 1 (2023): 113–16.
Daniel Knorr, Review of Richard Smith, Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography, and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times, Journal of International and Global Studies 5, no. 1: 96–98.
Daniel Knorr, “Profit and Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century China,” Enterprise & Society 23, no. 2 (2022): 582–89. (Review of William Rowe, Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century China and Peter Lavelle, The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China.)
Review of Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth Century History, Middle Ground Journal 10. https://middlegroundjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/knorrempiresreviewsspring2015themiddlegroundjournal-org.pdf.
Review of Xiaoxuan Wang, Maoism and Grassroots Religion: The Communist Revolution and the Reinvention of Religious Life in China, The PRC History Review, no. 25 (2020).

Book, Chapter

Daniel Knorr, “Debating China’s Destiny: Writing the Nation’s Past and Future in Wartime
China” in 1943: China at the Crossroads, ed. Joseph Esherick and Matthew Combs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Program). Translated by Chen Xiao as “Bianlun Zhongguo zhi mingyun: zai kangzhan shiqi shuxie Zhonghua minzu de guoqu he weilai,” in 1943: Zhongguo zai shizi lukou (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2016; Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2017).
Luo Dan, “Huangchao jintou zhi difangshi: Ershi shiji chu Jinan de Qingdai yimin yu xiugai fangzhi” [Local History at the End of Empire: Qing Loyalists and Gazetteer Revision in Early Twentieth Century Jinan], trans. Xie Changlong, in Yanbujin yi: chayi yu dangxia lishi xiezuo [Ineffable Difference: Difference and Historical Writing], ed. Chen Hao (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2023).

Journal Article

Daniel Knorr, “A Provincial Legacy of Autocracy: Shandong’s Luoyuan Academy in and beyond the Yongzheng Reign,” Ming Qing Yanjiu 28, no. 1 (2024): 4–38.
Daniel Knorr, “Fragile Bulwark: The Qing State in Jinan during the Taiping and Nian Wars,” Late Imperial China 43, no. 1 (2022): 43–83.
Daniel Knorr, “Thinking Outside the Walls: Illustrations of Cities and Extramural Space in Chinese Gazetteers,” Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 3 (2022): 123–48.
Daniel Knorr, “Placing the U.S. State in the Interior of China: The Jinan Missionary Case, 1881–1891,” Pacific Historical Review 90, no. 3 (2021): 279–313.