Bettine Birge

Bettine Birge is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, with joint appointments in the departments of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures. She holds degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities and received her Ph.D. from Columbia. She has received numerous awards for her research, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

During the academic year 2003-4 she lived in Beijing with her husband and young son on a Fulbright fellowship and worked with the Mongol-Yuan research group at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Professor Birge's research and teaching focus on pre-modern Chinese and Mongolian history specializing in marriage, property law, and gender relations. Her first book, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960-1368) (Cambridge University Press, 2002) received a Phi Kappa Phi award and is currently being translated into Chinese. Prof. Birge travels frequently to Asia for lecturing and research;speaks several European and Asian languages. She has traveled widely in Mongolian, including two camping expeditions in 2004 and 2006 to survey archeological sites with colleagues from Chinese and Mongolian universities. In August 2006 she was hosted by the President of Mongolia for an international conference and received a Presidential Medal for her contribution to the understanding of Mongolian history.

[She has a strong amateur interest in astronomy and eclipses of the sun, gained from her physicist parents who were eclipse enthusiasts.]