Rate My Professor Max Oidtmann

Oidtmann is a historian of late imperial China from roughly the 1400s through the early 20th century, focusing on interactions between China-based states such as the Ming and Qing empires and neighboring societies, governance of diverse populations including Tibetans, Mongols, and Muslims, and the relationship between Tibetan Buddhist elites and the Qing government, alongside local religious and legal cultures in borderlands like Gansu and Qinghai provinces. His major monograph, Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2018), explores Qing sovereignty, faith, and law in Tibetan regions using Manchu and Tibetan sources and received the E. Gene Smith Inner Asian Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2020. Key articles include “Overlapping Empires: Religion, Politics, and Ethnicity in 19th Century Qinghai” (Late Imperial China, 2016), “A ‘Dog-eat-dog’ World: Qing Jurispractices and the Legal Inscription of Piety in Amdo” (Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, 2016), and “Imperial Legacies and Revolutionary Legends: The Sibe Cavalry Company, the Eastern Turkestan Republic, and Historical Memories in Xinjiang” (Saksaha: A Journal of Manchu Studies, 2014). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese History (Cambridge University Press) since 2022 and has presented invited lectures at institutions including Academia Sinica, Oxford University, and the University of Würzburg. Oidtmann has held fellowships such as the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (2010), Harvard Fairbank Center Summer Research Grant (2012), and Qatar Foundation Faculty Research Grants (2014-2020). At LMU, he teaches courses on the history of China and Central Asia, training students to analyze primary sources in Chinese, Manchu, and Tibetan.