Hans van de Ven
Johan 'Hans' van de Ven is a Dutch historian, sinologist, and an authority on the history of 19th and 20th century China. He holds several positions at the University of Cambridge, where he is Professor of Modern Chinese History, Director in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St Catharine's College and previously served as Chair of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Career
Van de Ven completed undergraduate studies in sinology at Leiden University. After studying with Susan Naquin at the University of Pennsylvania, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Chinese history under Philip Kuhn and finished postdoctoral work as a fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He has particularly focused on the history of the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese warfare, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the history of globalization in modern China.Van de Ven is a guest professor at the History Department of Nanjing University and was an International Fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, China, in 2005-06. In 2019, he was appointed as an honorary visiting professor at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Peking University.
Since 2022, he has been a visiting chair professor at the Department of History at Peking University.