Melissa A. Brzycki, Ph.D.

• Associate Professor
• Director of Graduate Program in History

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Department: History and Anthropology

Office: James and Marlene Howard Hall 337

Phone: 732-263-5709

Email: mbrzycki@monmouth.edu

View CV

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Melissa Brzycki, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history. Her research focuses children and childhood in the People’s Republic of China from 1949-1966. She is interested in how the state tried to create a certain type of socialist child and how families and children responded to those initiatives. She is currently working on research relating to the experiences and treatment of criminalized children. At Monmouth University, she teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate classes in Chinese history, East Asian history, and world history with an eye towards empire, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and race.

Education

Ph.D., University of California at Santa Cruz

Scholarly Interests

• East Asia
• Childhood and Youth
• Gender and Sexuality

Scholarly Articles

• “Young Scientists and Model Children: Children as Independent Problem-Solvers and Political Actors in the Great Leap Forward, 1958-1961” European Journal of East Asian Studies, 23, no. 1 (2024), 1-24.
• “Crime and Survival: Juvenile Offenders in the PRC,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 16, no. 2 (2023), 248-265.
• “Revolutionary Successors: Deviant Children and Youth in the PRC, 1959-1964,” Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe Leahy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
• “Past and Presentism: Podcasting as Historical Work,” co-authored with Stephanie M. Montgomery, Public History Weekly, 9 (2021) 6.

Awards

2026 Monmouth University’s Distinguished Teaching Award