Dr Jennifer Altehenger

I research and teach the history of modern and contemporary China in its global contexts. Prior to joining the History Faculty, I was Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King's College London and an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. I am series co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China (Cambridge University Press), and Transformations of Modern China (De Gruyter), and Associate Editor of the journal Modern China. A few years ago I also edited 'The Mao Era in Objects', a website for anyone who would like to learn about the history of modern China and the Mao period (1949-1976) through interactive biographies. The project was funded by an AHRC leadership fellowship and designed by King's College Digital Lab. At Oxford, I am an affiliate of the Oxford China Centre and the Oxford Centre for Global History.

Co-Director, Centre for Global History (2023-2025)

Research Interests

• Material culture, industry, and design
• Cultural production and propaganda
• Socialist law and civic education

Most of my current work examines the history of design and industry in China after World War II. China today is one of the world's major furniture producers and a global manufacturer of materials used to make everyday objects. The material environments of people living in the UK, Europe, and other regions of the world are entangled with the lives of those working in Chinese design and industry. Yet we know little about the contemporary history that led to China's prominent position in global furniture manufacturing and design. My book -- Socialism by Design: How Mass-Produced Furniture Modernized China (under contract with Princeton University Press) - will tell the stories of people who helped materialise modern China in urban coastal as well as interior cities, and internationally: as designers and producers in research institutes, state offices, factories, communes, and individual homes; as traders across the capitalist and socialist world; and as users who altered objects, furnished interiors, and found creative solutions in times of material shortage. The project has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. As part of this research, I have written on the history of design magazines, trade exhibitions, housing design, bamboo objects, and furniture standards and standardization. Together with Dr. Denise Ho (Yale University), I edited Material Contradictions in Mao's China (2022) and I am co-editor of the volume, How Maoism Was Made, with Prof. Aaron W. Moore (University of Edinburgh) for the Proceedings of the British Academy (2025).

I also continue to maintain an interest in the history of law and civic education in state socialism. My book Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1989 (Harvard Asia Centre/Harvard University Press, 2018) shed light on China's history of state-led mass legal education, from the early years of the People's Republic into the first decade of 'reform and opening' after Mao Zedong's death in 1976. Asking not whether laws were successfully implemented but how they were communicated and to what effect, the book demonstrated that educating the general population in laws has been a crucial, if controversial, component of Chinese Communist Party governance. Laws, in other words, are central to understanding Chinese socialist statecraft during a period often thought of as 'lawless'.