Dr Melanie Meng Xue, Assistant Professor, Department of Economic History, LSE
The Department is delighted to welcome Dr Melanie Meng Xue, who joins us this autumn as Assistant Professor.
Melanie’s research lies at the intersection of economic history and political economy. She has studied the rise of gender-equitable beliefs and the deterioration of social capital in the context of imperial China. By tracing the impact of historical events over time and in various institutional settings, her work isolates the role of values, beliefs, and norms in shaping economic and political disparities. Another strand of her research concerns the decoding of folklore and mythology as a new approach to understanding historical values, and she has an article on this forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
In her first year she will be teaching on EH207 The Making of an Economic Superpower: China since 1850 and supervising both undergraduate and masters students.
Melanie studied as an undergraduate at Fudan University before moving to the United States, where she took her PhD at George Mason University. Since graduating, she has held positions at UCLA and, most recently, NYU Abu Dhabi before joining us.