Kristin Stapleton is a Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her research focuses on urban history, particularly the history of governance and social change, as well as the creation and influence of representations of historical events in works of literature. She is the author of Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937 (Harvard Asia Center, 2000), >Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family (Stanford, 2016), and The Modern City in Asia (Cambridge, 2022), among other works. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Twentieth-Century China and a participant in the Global Urban History Project.