Dr. Glenn Tiffert

Dr. Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, earned his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. From 2015 to 2017, he was the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in Residence at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he also held faculty appointments in the History Department and Asian Languages & Cultures Department and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on modern China. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, and UCLA and currently serves on the Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History.

Dr. Tiffert’s research interests center on twentieth century China, particularly its experience of revolution. At the vanguard among scholars of modern Chinese legal history, he has published works in English and Chinese on the construction of the modern Chinese court system and judiciary, the drafting of the 1954 PRC Constitution, the legacies of Nationalist judicial modernization to the PRC, and the hidden genealogy of current PRC legal policy. He is now completing a book manuscript that radically disrupts received wisdom about the 1949 revolution and the PRC’s place in Chinese history via the first archival study in any language of the takeover and reconstitution of Beijing’s Nationalist courts by the Chinese Communist Party.

Dr. Tiffert also is pioneering the integration of computational methods drawn from data science into the study of Chinese history. Using China as an illustrative case, his latest research empirically documents the alarming synergies between digitization, intellectual property law, censorship, and authoritarianism, and exposes how emerging technologies could spur Orwellian manipulation of the historical record and memory on a global scale.