About Michelle

Michelle T. King is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. Her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024) was named by the New York Times, NPR, and Saveur as one of their notable books of the year, shortlisted for the Baifang Schell China Book Prize and a finalist for the International Association of Culinary Professionals Book Award. She has received major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin Institute for Historical Studies, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

King is a co-editor of Modern Chinese Foodways (MIT Press, 2025), editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and editor of a special issue of Global Food History (Summer 2020) on culinary regionalism in China. She is author of Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Food and Foodways, Global Food History, Gastronomica, Journal of Women’s History, Social History, and other publications. She lives in Chapel Hill with her family.