Ruth Mostern

Ruth Mostern is Director of the Institute for Spatial Innovation and Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and Vice President of the World History Association.  She is the author of two single-authored books of Chinese history that combine historical narrative and spatial analysis: Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, 960-1276 CE (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), and The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2022.  She is also co-editor of the spatial history methods book Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016), and of a special issue of Open Rivers Journal (2017).  She is the author or co-author of over thirty articles published in books and peer reviewed journals.  Ruth is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the World Historical Gazetteer, a prize-winning digital infrastructure platform for integrating databases of historical place name information.  Her research has been funded by entities that include the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the US National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and others.  She has held visiting positions in China, Australia, and the United States. At present she is working on two spatial history research projects: one about the history of climate, erosion, and settlement in northwest China, and one about the global history of placemaking.  Ruth received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 and was Founding Faculty at the University of California, Merced, where she spent 13 years before moving to Pitt in 2017.