Dr Ying Dai

I was trained as a geographer at Peking University before pursuing a PhD in History at Cambridge. After submitting my doctoral dissertation in September 2022, I commuted between the LSE and Cambridge as a Tawney Fellow, funded by the Economic History Society. I then returned to the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure before joining the Faculty of History at Oxford as a departmental lecturer.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the history of labour and gender, particularly in modern China, with a comparative approach. My doctoral work identified recently compiled lineage genealogies as a new source for researching the occupational structure of 20th-century China, for which (arguably) reliable census data are only available from 1982 onwards. These genealogies also uncover a double-peak pattern of by-employment in the 20th-century Yangtze Valley, shaped by economic specialization, structural change, and the land systems. My recent research reconstructs the historical geography of foot-binding using female labour force participation by age group data from the 1982 census, highlighting the prolonged exit of foot-binding from Chinese women's working lives. In the future, I aim to combine quantitative data with qualitative biographies from genealogies to understand working lives in 20th-century China.