Professor Nicole Elizabeth Barnes begins term as APSI's faculty director in July 2026

The Asian/Pacific Studies Institute is thrilled to share the news that Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, an associate professor of history at Duke with appointments in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and the Duke Global Health Institute, will serve as the director of APSI, effective July 1, 2026. Professor Barnes has built a distinguished professional career examining connections between health, politics, and daily life.

As a feminist scholar of women’s and gender histories, and the first ever woman to serve as faculty director of APSI, I will lead with a keen attention to gender equity. I also intend to explore, with the essential input of colleagues and students, opportunities for thickening the ties between APSI and AADS. This push against the barriers that would have us treat the “homelands” and the diaspora as separate entities aligns with endeavors such as the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias.”
—Nicole Elizabeth Barnes

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As a leading historian of medicine focused on twentieth-century China, Barnes centers her academic inquiry around the human body. Drawing insight from the fields of history as well as gender and feminist studies and sensory history, she explores how physical entities intersect with and relate to broader social worlds. Accordingly, Barnes's research spans vital areas of modern Chinese history, medical humanities, and social infrastructure. Her acclaimed first monograph, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937–1945, published by the (University of California Press, 2018), traces the ways in which female healthcare workers sustained communities amidst the chaos of war, fundamentally shaping Chinese modernity. This book received the 2019 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History from the American Historical Association as well as the 2020 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association of the History of Medicine.

Most recently, Barnes has been studying the social and ecological history of night soil and toilets in modern China. Expanding into environmental and social histories of infrastructure, Barnes’ illuminating microhistorical study, “The Many Values of Night Soil in Wartime China,” published in 2023 in the journal Past & Present, investigates a 1940 petition by Chongqing night-soil trade union leaders. Her research reveals shifting olfactory sensibilities and urban hygienic struggles in wartime China, concluding by asking readers to consider what might be possible if we recontextualize the practice of using night soil as fertilizer. Instead of regarding this centuries-old practice as an anti-modern relic, we can understand it as a sustainable means of processing waste and caring for our planet.

In addition to these projects, she is working on a historical fiction novel about two men who emigrated from the Toisan region of Guangdong in the 1880s and lived the rest of their lives in eastern Oregon. Bringing the same diligence to this endeavor as she devotes to her academic publications, she is expanding the boundaries of public intellectual engagement, developing a unique story that is grounded in meticulously-researched facts and will appeal to readers interested in Chinese history, American history, Asian American history, queer representation, frontier history, and the history of medicine on two continents.

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Step into a classroom taught by Professor Barnes, and you will quickly realize that history is never just a collection of static dates and distant names. She brings her research directly to students through engaging, interdisciplinary coursework. Recent courses include comprehensive offerings on the history of modern China, traditional and evolving practices of Chinese medicine, global health, and the broader global history of medicine. In each class, she challenges graduate and undergraduate students alike to historicize everyday norms and understand how structural societal forces manifest directly on and within human lives.

This fall, Professor Barnes will serve as the lead instructor for EAS 700, the core course for students in the MA in East Asian Studies program at Duke. This challenging, interdisciplinary graduate degree is ideal for students preparing for further study in a PhD program or for those seeking to deepen their regional knowledge and launch a professional career. The course introduces students to essential research methods and emerging topics used in multiple academic disciplines, providing ample opportunity for tailoring a curriculum to meet individual needs.