Michelle T. King

Michelle T. King serves as Associate Professor in the Department of History within the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also holds administrative roles as Director of Departmental Culture and Climate and Associate Chair for Research. Currently on leave during Spring 2025, she maintains an active research and publication profile while advising graduate students.

Her educational foundation includes a BA from Yale University (1995), MA from Stanford University (2000), and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). King specializes in modern Chinese gender history and food history, with particular focus on culinary nationalism, diaspora foodways, and female culinary authority in twentieth-century China. Her research bridges cultural history, gender studies, and transnational food systems, examining how food practices reflect broader societal transformations including postwar media proliferation, women's changing domestic roles, and geopolitical shifts between China and Taiwan.

King's scholarly output demonstrates consistent thematic development across her publications, with recent work expanding from historical analysis of Chinese food practices to contemporary examinations of pandemic-related food stigma and future culinary trajectories. Her 2024 monograph Chop Fry Watch Learn represents the culmination of years examining Fu Pei-mei's role in shaping global perceptions of Chinese cuisine, while her editorial work on Modern Chinese Foodways (2025) and Culinary Nationalism in Asia (2019) establishes her as a leading voice in comparative food studies.

• National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Grant
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Fellowship
• University of Texas at Austin Institute for Historical Studies Fellowship
• Journal of Women's History Biennial Best Article Prize (2017-18)

King actively mentors graduate students through co-advisement with colleagues including Michael Tsin and Erik Gellman, guiding research on Chinese history topics. Her teaching portfolio includes specialized courses such as HIST 285—Twentieth-Century China and HNRS 353—The Cultural History of Food in China. While no formal laboratory structure is mentioned, her research integrates oral history methodologies, archival analysis, and contemporary media critique within collaborative academic frameworks.