Maura Dykstra is a historian of Late Imperial China, with an emphasis on bureaucratic, economic, and legal institutions of empire and their implications for political and social interactions in quotidian contexts. She is interested in how people are governed and how policy decisions—no matter how well-considered and seemingly straightforward—produce unexpected consequences.

Prior to joining the Caltech faculty in 2016, Dykstra earned her PhD from UCLA and spent a year as an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. She has held residential fellowships and visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, the Taiwan National Library's Center for Chinese Studies, the Tokyo University Graduate School of Law and Politics, East China Normal University, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Her first book, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Unexpected Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-century Qing State, is scheduled to be released by Harvard University Asia Center Press in the summer of 2022. She is currently working on a second monograph project that traces the rise and fall of the Ming Empire in the southwest.

In addition to her work advising several history theses on a variety of topics and running the History Thesis Group for writers of theses in the humanities, she was a member of the group responsible for creating the Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science seminar series in the fall of 2020. In the course of this series, which featured multiple events co-organized with Professor of English Jennifer Jahner, Research Professor of Art and Design Hillary Mushkin, and University Archivist Peter Collopy, both guests and members of the Caltech community explored interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the history and legacy of eugenics.