Biography & Research

Joshua Eisenman (马佳士) is professor of politics in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He  is a fellow of the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and Pulte Institute for Global Development.

Eisenman’s research focuses on the political economy of China’s development and foreign relations with the United States and the Global South —particularly Africa. His latest book, “China’s Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement” (Columbia University Press, 2023) with Ambassador David H. Shinn, examines the full scope of political and security relations between China and Africa. It explains the tactics and methods that China uses to build relations with African countries and contextualizes and interprets them within Beijing’s larger geostrategy. The book is a follow-up to “China and Africa: A Century of Engagement” (University of Pennsylvania Press), which was named one of the “Best International Relations Books of 2012″ by Foreign Affairs. In 2020, that book’s updated second edition was published in Chinese by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Eisenman’s research has appeared in top development economics journals including World Development, Development and Change, Third World Quarterly, and the Journal of International Development, and in various other prestigious academic publications such as Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Contemporary China, China Review, and Cold War History.

Eisenman also has written for popular outlets including Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy, and his views on China’s domestic and foreign policy have been quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, on National Public Radio and in many other prominent outlets. Eisenman fourth book, Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune (Columbia University Press, 2018) received the 2019 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award honorable mention and was highly reviewed in more than a dozen prestigious outlets including Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, the American Historical Review,  Journal of Asian Studies, and the China Journal. The book explains how more capital investment and better farming techniques increased agricultural productivity growth in Maoist China. In “China Steps Out: Beijing’s Major Power Engagement with the Developing World” (Routledge, 2018), Eisenman worked with Eric Heginbotham to analyze and compare China’s policies toward the Global South.

Before coming to Notre Dame in 2019, Eisenman was assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been a visiting faculty member at Fudan University (summer 2017), Peking University (summer 2016), and NYU–Shanghai (2011–12). He was a policy analyst on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (2003–05) and has been a senior fellow for China studies at the American Foreign Policy Council since 2006.  Eisenman holds a PhD in political science from UCLA, an MA in international relations from Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, and a BA in East Asian Studies from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

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