The Confucius Institute invites the public for a public lecture on Chinese history by Kenneth Pomeranz, Professor of Modern History at the University of Chicago and former president of the American Historical Association. His work focuses mostly on China, though he is also very interested in comparative and world history. His current projects include a history of Chinese political economy from the seventeenth century to the present, and a book called Why Is China So Big? which tries to explain how and why contemporary China’s huge land mass and population have wound up forming a single political unit.