LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ -- Dr. Anne Osborne, associate professor of history at Rider University, has received a research fellowship from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China which will allow her to spend six months beginning in January in the People's Republic of China to do research for her new book, Barren Mountains, Raging Rivers: The Ecological Effects of Social and Economic Change in Late Imperial China.

Osborne, a resident of Pipersville, PA, will be associated with the National People's University in Beijing, and be granted admittance to the Number One Historical Archives, a limited-access library containing the records of the Qing Dynasty which ruled from 1644 to 1911. She will research criminal cases submitted to the central government during the 18th and 19th centuries to see how population pressure, commercial growth, and environmental degradation often erupted into violence. These records of brawls and murders provide clues to changes at work in Chinese society in the late imperial period.

"By reading reports from each province on each capital case, I can get an understanding of the stress and pressures in society during that time," said Osborne. "The reports give a sense of government policy and what kinds of local problems existed, and also hold clues to China's weakness to imperialist pressure and contemporary barriers to its development."

Osborne, who previously conducted research in China with the support of Rider University in the summer of 1996, also hopes to bring back slides and images of Chinese history and culture so that her students "can understand the real-life culture and benefit from this experience."

The Committee on Scholary Communication with China awards all grants for American scientific, social scientific, and humanities research in the People's Republic of China. The grants are funded by the American

Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rider University is a private, nonsectarian institution with a 353-acre campus in Lawrenceville, NJ, and a 23-acre campus in Princeton, NJ. It is divided into five academic units -- the Colleges of Business Administration, Education and Human Services, Liberal Arts and Science, Continuing Studies, and Westminster Choir College. U.S. News and World Report again ranks Rider in the top tier of regional universities and colleges in the north.