Chaoran Ma

Chaoran Ma is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral training spans three subfields: late imperial and modern Chinese history, modern European history, and the history of gender and sexuality. Her research focuses on China and East Asia since 1300, with particular interests in law, politics, gender, and family.
With the generous support of the Natalie Zemon Davis Fellowship, she is completing her dissertation, Infidelity on Trial: Law and Politics of Intimacy in China, 1800–1949. The dissertation argues that infidelity lay at the center of the governance of intimacy in late imperial and modern China. By tracing shifting legal definitions of adultery and prostitution, it shows how the state sought to consolidate its political authority, preserve social morality and reshape civic identity through the regulation of emotional and sexual transgressions. It also examines how ordinary people 
navigated the legal and judicial system and engaged in the everyday politics of intimacy.
Chaoran is pursuing a side project that draws on Han Chinese and Manchu archival sources to investigate human trafficking in the borderlands of late imperial China. She is also interested in comparative studies of law, gender, and family in modern China and Europe.