Keith McMahon, Professor

Keith McMahon, Professor

Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from the Legendary Past to the Aftermath of Empress Wu

Keith McMahon studies Ming and Qing fiction, male and female character types, Chinese eroticism, the culture of opium smoking in 19th century China and Euro-America, psychoanalytic theory, and the history of imperial polygamy from the legendary past to the end of the imperial era.
He received his B.A. in French and Comparative Literature in 1974 from Indiana University, his M.A. in Chinese in 1976 from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in Chinese in 1984 from Princeton University. He studied one year of Chinese in Taiwan in 1976-77 and did Ph.D. and post-doctorate research at Fudan University in Shanghai and Beijing University in Beijing for four years between 1979 and 1991. He has taught at the University of Kansas since 1984, where he was chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures from1996 to 2008. He taught one semester at the University of California at Berkeley in 2002.