Biography
D. Jonathan (Jon) Felt is an associate professor of premodern Chinese History at Brigham Young University. He earned his BA from BYU, his MA from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and his PhD from Stanford University in 2014. After teaching for two years at Virginia Tech, he joined the BYU History Department in 2016. His first book, Patterns of the Earth: Metageographies of Early Medieval China, examines the early development of geographical writing during the third to seventh century CE, its historical context, and its metageographies (geographical conceptual frameworks) that challenged imperial geographies from the Han empire. Felt has also published articles on various aspects of early medieval Chinese history in American, Japanese, and European journals. Building on his past work in Spatial History and his personal passion for the outdoors, Felt’s second book project is a work of Environment History. It examines the distinctive environment of the Hexi Corridor in northwestern China, how it changed throughout the early imperial period, and how it shaped regional-imperial tensions in and cultural exchanges through this space.