Chris Kim is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He received his PhD from Columbia University, MA from Harvard University, and BA from Brown University. His research examines statecraft, political economy, and spatial dynamics of state power in Zhou China (1045-221 BCE) through paleographic, archaeological, and textual analysis. His doctoral research on the Qi state in Shandong Province in eastern China explored how resources such as salt, coinage, and defensive fortifications were marshalled to construct state spaces and political economic networks that converged on the Qi capital city of Linzi, one of the largest metropolises of its time. In so doing, it charted the processes by which an early Chinese polity developed over the course of the first millennium BCE into a territorial power presaging the rise of the first empire in Chinese history.
Chris’s current work expands on the monetary history of early China by examining the origins of coinage in the Luoyang region of China in comparative perspective with the roughly contemporaneous emergence of coinage in the eastern Mediterranean world, as well as the subsequent development of distinct regional monetary zones across China in the Warring States period (453-221 BCE). In addition, his ongoing research seeks to further investigate the relationship between central authority and regional/local administration in early China through a study of the material dimensions of Eastern Zhou (770-256 BCE) kingship, which was seated also in Luoyang.