Kate Merkel-Hess

Short Biography

Kate Merkel-Hess is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. She studies modern China and her dissertation examines reform efforts to modernize rural populations in the 1920s and 1930s. Merkel-Hess received a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University in 1999. She was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant for 2006–7 and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2008–9.