Michael Chiang

In and out of the classroom, Dr. Michael Chiang helps students utilize the lessons of East Asian history and culture to enrich their own identity and promote their academic advancement. Because history essentially covers every discipline, it serves as a vital method by which students can critically reflect on the context for the globalized society we live in today. By exposing students to ways of thinking and to social and political arrangements that differ from their own in both time and place, Dr. Chiang hopes to initiate in them a cultural and self-discovery that confronts them with the question of “How ought we to live?” by asking them to explore “How did others live (and why)?”

Dr. Chiang's research expertise is in the political and institutional history of late imperial China with a particular interest in the history of Taiwan. He studies how bureaucratic institutions shape the contours of central and local understandings of territorial organization in a large and far-flung empire such as Qing China. His current book project examines the role that the post-designation system played in creating a regime of legibility and administrative control that came to comprise bureaucratic knowledge in eighteenth-century China.

Dr. Chiang was named the 2021 Regis College Faculty Lecturer of the Year. He received the Regis University Champion for Equity & Inclusion award in 2022.