Madeleine Zelin is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University.
At Columbia, Zelin is affiliated with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Department of History, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and the Columbia Law School.
In the West, Zelin pioneered the study of Chinese legal and economic history.
[1] In 2005, Zelin published The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia University Press), a study of the indigenous roots of Chinese economic culture and business practice.
She has also authored The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch'ing China (University of California Press, 1984), co-edited Contract and Property Rights in Early Modern China, (Stanford University Press, 2004), co-edited Nation and Beyond: Chinese History in Late Imperial and Modern Times (University of California Press, 2006), and translated Mao Dun's novel Rainbow (University of California Press, 1992).