Gordon H. Chang Critically acclaimed author and historian

張少書

Professor of American History, Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities

Stanford University

Gordon H. Chang is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. With degrees from Princeton and Stanford, Chang specializes in the history of America-China relations and Asian American history. He has written and edited many books and essays on these topics. Among these are Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972 (Stanford University Press, 1990); Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writing, 1942-1945 (SUP, 1997); Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001); Chinese American Voices From the Gold Rush to the Present (University of California Press, 2006); Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (SUP, 2008); and Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (Harvard University Press, 2015). Several of his books and essays have been translated and published in China and Taiwan. His latest work, Fateful Ties, speaks to the current American fixation with China as potential foe as well as global partner.

At Stanford, he is now co-directing the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project that is recovering and interpreting the history of Chinese workers who toiled on the first transcontinental rail line and other lines in the 19th century.

Chang was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. His father was the artist Zhang Shuqi from Hangzhou who advanced U.S.-China relations in the 1940s when he toured the country to teach and lecture on Chinese painting. His most famous composition was the “Messengers of Peace” which President Franklin D. Roosevelt received as a gift from the Chinese government.

Chang and his family live on the Stanford campus. He enjoys the great outdoors, good food and wine, art, and orchids, which he grows as a hobby.