Beth E. Notar is an Anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersection of the cultural and the material. This focus has led her to examine the relationship between representations in popular culture, tourism and transformations of place in southwest China; money as a symbolic, economic and political object and cars, taxis and mobility in urban China. While fluent in Mandarin, she is currently learning Burmese and planning a new comparative project on mobility in Myanmar (Burma). 

After graduating with a degree in Chinese Studies from Wellesley College, she spent three years in China and Taiwan: studying Mandarin at Beijing University, working as a translator at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan and studying Chinese economy and history at the Johns Hopkins – Nanjing University Chinese-American Cultural Center in Nanjing. It was then that she became fascinated with the changes of China’s reform era and decided to pursue research there. She first returned to the U.S. for theoretical and methodological training in Chinese Studies (M.A.) and Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Michigan.

Notar views research and teaching as mutually reinforcing, and sees learning as an active process which involves discussion, research and writing. For her, Anthropology is crucial for helping students fulfill Trinity’s mission statement to “foster critical thinking, free the mind of parochialism and prejudice, and prepare students to lead examined lives that are personally satisfying, civically responsible, and socially useful.”

• Notar, Beth E. “Off Limits and Out of Bounds: Taxi Driver Perceptions of Dangerous People and Places in Kunming, China.” In Rethinking Global Urbanism: Comparative Insights from Secondary Cities, edited by Xiangming Chen and Ahmed Kanna, 190-207.  New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
• Notar, Beth E.  Zaijian <Wuduo Jinhua> yu <Tianlong babu>: Yunnan Dali de zhuti gongyuanhua (Bringing Five Golden Flowers and Heavenly Dragons to Life: the Theme-parkization of Dali, Yunnan).” Chengshi Zhongguo (Urban China) 52 (April 2012): 66-71. Trans. by Huang Shaoting.
• Notar, Beth E. “Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands: Lonely Planeteers and ‘Local’ Cosmopolitans in Southwest China.” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 3 (summer 2008): 615-650.
• Notar, Beth E. Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, November 2006.
• Notar, Beth E. “Authenticity Anxiety and Counterfeit Confidence: Outsourcing Souvenirs, Changing Money, and Narrating Value in Reform-Era China.” Modern China 32, no.1 (Jan 2006): 64-98.
• Notar, Beth E. “Ties that Dissolve and Bind: Competing Currencies, Prestige and Politics in Early Twentieth Century China.” In Value and Valuables: From the Sacred to the Symbolic, edited by Duran Bell and Cynthia Werner. Society for Economic Anthropology Monograph, Vol.21. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2003, 128-157.
• Notar, Beth E. “Viewing Currency ‘Chaos’: Paper Money for Advertising, Ideology and Resistance in Republican China.” In Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920-1970, edited by Terry Bodenhorn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 123-149.
• Notar, Beth E. “Blood Money: Woman’s Consumption and Desire in Ermo.” Asian Cinema (Fall/Winter 2001): 132-153.
• Notar, Beth E. “Du Wenxiu and the Politics of the Muslim Past,” Twentieth-Century China. Vol.26, no.2 (April 2001): 63-94.
• Notar, Beth E. “Of Labor and Liberation: Images of Women in Current Chinese Television Advertising.” Visual Anthropology Review 10, 2 (1994): 29-44.

• Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professorship 2009-2011
• National Endowment for Humanities Summer Stipend, 2008
• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship, 1994
• Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, National Graduate Program Scholarship,1993-1995
• National Science Foundation Summer Research Grant, 1992
• Foreign Language Area Studies Scholarship, 1988-1990
• College and University Grants and Awards
• Trinity College Three-Year Faculty Research Grant, 2004-2007
• Trinity College Hartford Metropolitan Research Expense Grant, 2001
• University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies Endowment Award, 1991-1993
• Johns Hopkins - Nanjing University Scholarship, 1987-1988