Profiles
Alexander Cook
Department of Asian Languages
Email: accook@stanford.edu
Alexander C. Cook received an AB in East Asian Studies from Brown University and a PhD in History from Columbia University. He is currently working on three projects:
Unsettling Accounts: Justice, Humanity, and the Trial of the Gang of Four is the first history of China’s most famous legal trial and also a fundamental reinterpretation of the little-studied post-Mao transition. The struggle to salvage socialist ideals from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution illuminates the major themes of contemporary history: the trauma of mass violence, skepticism of modernism as a blueprint for rebuilding, and the search for new ways of knowing and speaking about the past.
Three Worlds Apart: Chinese Visions of Africa in the Sino-Soviet Split looks at Chinese interventions across the African continent in the 1960s and 1970s. In a stunning bid to remake the modern world order, Maoists called for the Third World to rise up against the dual imperialist forces of American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism. The Maoists’ repudiation of the Soviet Union – and their subsequent self-identification with a Third World they barely knew – reveals a bold but troubled vision of their place in global history.
A Global History of Mao’s “Little Red Book” is a collaborative effort to analyze the textual circulation and historical impact of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong in such disparate places as Albania, Tanzania, Cuba, France, and the United States.
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