Participant Info

First Name
Kelsey
Last Name
Granger
Country
United Kingdom
State
Affiliation
IHR, London
Website URL
https://history.academia.edu/KelseyGranger
Keywords
Chinese history, environmental history, animal studies, Silk Roads, manuscripts, material culture
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Kelsey Granger is a historian of China and the wider Silk Roads focusing on environmental history, manuscripts, and material culture. She is particularly interested in the interactions between animal labour, technological change, and text culture. Her research makes use of received Classical Chinese texts alongside excavated manuscripts, visual sources incl. murals and ceramics, and archaeological remains.

Recent Publications
  1. Kelsey Granger. ‘An Equine Archive? Using Excavated Documents to Recover the Entangled Labor of Humans and Horses in China’s Ancient Postal System’. Animal History 2.2 (2026).
  2. Kelsey Granger. ‘Writing Animals into East Asian History’. T’oung Pao 115.5-6 (2025).
  3. Kelsey Granger. ‘Calm at the Carriage, Kills Bandits, Protects the Stables: Unique Horse Names in Excavated Han Administrative Documents from Xuanquan’. Early China 47 (2024).
  4. Kelsey Granger and Imre Galambos, eds. Saved from Desert Sands: Re-discovering Objects on the Silk Roads. East and West Series, Vol. 18. Leiden: Brill (2024).
  5. Kelsey Granger. ‘A Pensive Prince or a Languid Lady? Tang Ceramics of Women Seated on Hourglass Stools’. In Saved from Desert Sands: Re-discovering Objects on the Silk Roads (2024).
  6. Kelsey Granger and Imre Galambos. ‘Re-discovering Objects: Material Culture on the Silk Roads’. In Saved from Desert Sands: Re-discovering Objects on the Silk Roads (2024).
  7. Kelsey Granger. ‘From Tomb-keeper to Tomb-occupant: The Changing Conceptualisation of Dogs in Early China’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33.3 (2023).
  8. Kelsey Granger. ‘Violence, Vigilantism, and Virtue: Re-Assessing Medieval Female Avenger Accounts through the Study of Narratives about Xie Xiao’e’. Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.4 (2022).
  9. Kelsey Granger. ‘Three Curious Dogs in a Dunhuang Manuscript: Re-evaluating the Identification of “Yaks” in Pelliot chinois 2598’. Bulletin of SOAS 84.2 (2021).
Media Coverage
Bayern Radio 2, Reader's Digest Digital, Royal Asiatic Society, BBC In Our Time
Country Focus
China, Central Asia
Expertise by Geography
Asia, China, East Asia
Expertise by Chronology
Ancient, Medieval
Expertise by Topic
Environment, Gender, Material Culture, Women