Ryan Nichols

Ryan Nichols is an interdisciplinary researcher who, since 2004, has been mostly focused on the question ‘What made China Chinese?’ In pursuit of an answer, he has collaborated with researchers in the humanities, social science, life science, data science, and mathematics. Ryan has published a monograph with Oxford, and recently edited The Routledge International Handbook of Morality, Cognition, and Emotion in China. He has held fellowships at University of British Columbia, Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has held a three-year Academic Cross-Training fellowship from the John Templeton Foundation. He is a professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, in Orange County. His research on footbinding includes an exceptionally critical review paper of the apparently reigning explanation, the labor market theory, and, with collaborators, an agent-based model of 1,000 years footbinding that is as faithful as possible to the actual demographic history of China.