Dr. Zhaojin Zeng is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, specializing in business and economic history, the history of industry and technology, and computational data analytics. His research encompasses two threads: one is about the rise of China’s factory economy in the twentieth-century world, and the other is the techniques and strategies of computational storytelling for the humanities and social sciences. He is directing the "Computational Humanities Lab" (ch.pubpub.org) an interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative that explores the intersection of humanistic inquiry and computational methodologies.

His first book project, Engineering Modern China: Industrial Factories and the Transformation of the Chinese Economy in the Long Twentieth Century, is the first to analyze the remarkable transformation of the Chinese factory economy from the late Qing to post-Mao eras. His writings have appeared in journals such as World Development and Management & Organizational History as well as in edited volumes from Cambridge University Press and Routledge. Dr. Zeng founded "The Chinese Factory Project" (https://chinesefactory.org/), a digital humanities and data analytics initiative that collects and publicizes archival materials and quantitative datasets on the history of China’s industrial development. 

Dr. Zeng actively engages in academic service and professional activities. He has served on committees and boards concerning academic and professional affairs. Currently, he is Vice President of the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies (SWCAS), the prominent regional conference of the Association for Asian Studies. He is an editorial board member of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, the official journal of the Business History Conference.

Dr. Zeng has an interdisciplinary educational background and working experience. He holds his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.Phil. in Social Science from the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Before joining Texas A&M University-San Antonio in Fall 2023, he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor of History at Duke Kunshan University (2020-2023) and a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian History at the University of Pittsburgh (2018-2020).