Tristan Brown

Tristan G Brown is a historian of China whose research examines how societies establish authoritative knowledge about the natural and human worlds, and how those ideas shape law, religion, politics, and the environment. Spanning the sixteenth century to the present, his work explores how claims about nature, the past, and the sacred come to be accepted as legitimate and acquire political force.

His first book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton University Press, 2023), argues that fengshui, the belief that landscapes possess cosmic power, was not a folk superstition on the fringes of Qing governance. Instead, it shaped the legal system, influencing disputes over land, mining, forests, and ancestral graves. The book received the John K Fairbank Award from the American Historical Association, the Biennial Book Prize from the International Society for Chinese Law and History, and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. It has been translated into Traditional and Simplified Chinese, with a Russian translation forthcoming.

Building on his interest in how knowledge about the natural world becomes politically consequential, his current book project, Winter’s Rule: Ice and Governance in Early Modern China, examines how winter transformed governance in the Ming and Qing periods, tracing how frozen rivers and seasonal ice reshaped warfare, transportation, ritual, refrigeration, and imperial administration. Using both Chinese and Manchu sources, the project explores how ice shaped political, social, and cultural life in late imperial China. He is also co-PI of an interdisciplinary MIT Human Insight Collaborative project investigating why legal language becomes so difficult to understand across time and cultures through methods drawn from history, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Alongside these projects, Brown has edited special issues of History of Humanities and the Journal of History of Science and Technology. His publications span law, religion, environmental history, architecture, the history of science, and Islam in China. His work has appeared in the American Historical Review, T’oung Pao, and the Journal of Chinese History, among others.

Brown has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, St John’s College, Cambridge, and Stanford University, and is an elected member of the National Committee on US-China Relations.