Xinru Liu

Xinru Liu (born 1951) is an associate professor of early Indian history and world history at The College of New Jersey, and has held since 1993 a full professorship at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.^[1]

Liu had little formal schooling but instead worked as a peasant and then as a factory worker during the Cultural Revolution. She taught herself English and history and gained admittance to the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a PhD in 1985 for work on Ancient Indian and Chinese History. Her PhD dissertation was published by Oxford University Press as Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, A.D. 1-600 (1988).^[2][3] She has written many books on Indian and Chinese history.

Liu has won a Grant from American Association of University Women, 1984, a Grant from Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1990. Her book, "Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, A.D. 1-600" won the award for Outstanding Research Works done between 1977 and 1991 from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is a member of the American Association of Asian Studies, The American Historical Association, and the World History Association.^[4]

Her most recent work is Dionysus and drama in the Buddhist art of Gandhara written jointly with Pia Brancaccio and published in the Journal of Global History.^[5]

Books

• Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, A.D. 1-600 (1988)
• A Social History of Ancient India, Beijing: the Publisher of Chinese Social Sciences (1990)
• Studies on Monarchism and Despotism in the Ancient World (1993)
• Silk and Religion—An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People in A.D. 600-1200 (1996)^[6]
• The Silk Road, in the series of Essays on Global and Comparative History (1998)
• Connections Across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads (2007)
• The Silk Road in World History (2010)
• The Silk Roads: A Brief History with Documents (2012)

Articles

• “Republics in Ancient India,” World History, Beijing, 1996, no.3.
• “A Study of Primitive Democracy,” Historiography Quarterly, Beijing, 1997 no.2.
• “Origin of the Caste System in South Asia,” Historiography Quarterly, Beijing, 1998, no.2.
• “Social Mobility in the Caste System in South Asia,” Historiography Quarterly, Beijing, 1999, no. 4.
• “Silk, Robes and Relations between Early Chinese Dynasties and Nomads beyond the Great Wall,” in Robes and honor: the Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Steward Gordon, St. Martin’s press.
• “Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan : Interaction and Interdependence of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies,” the Journal of World History, Fall 2001.
• “Trade and Pilgrimage Routes from Afghanistan to Taxila, Mathura and the Ganges Plains,” Hindistan Turk Tarihi Arastirmalari, The Journal of Indo-Turcica, no.1, 2001, 113-140.
• "A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam," Journal of World History, Vol. 22 No. 1, 2011.

References