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Engaging 'China': Perspectives from the Margins
(in alphabetical order based on last name)
Edwin Black
Edwin Black studied for a BA in Classics and Philosophy and an MSt in Global and Imperial History, both at Oxford. His MSt dissertation focused on the diaries of diplomatic voyagers in late Qing dynasty China. He is the Principal of Liuyin Academy, a secondary school for the humanities in Beijing, China, where he teaches philosophy and world history. His academic interests are in Qing dynasty history, particularly in the intersections of history with philosophy and geography. He speaks Chinese fluently and has a reading knowledge of Latin, Classical Greek, and French.
Yuanyuan Duan
Yuanyuan Duan is a Master’s student at the history department of Fudan University and currently an exchange student at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on the history and culture of ethnic groups in southwest China during the Ming and Qing periods. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Chinese history from Wuhan University in 2012. During her undergraduate degree, she conducted a research program aimed at exploring immigration and trans-border trade between the Yunnan and Southeast Asia regions. She conducted field study research in Tengchong county, Yunnan province. On January 2017, she participated in IHP History Workshop held by Institute of History and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (Taipei), whose theme was convergence of people, crafts, and institutions from the perspective of world history. Her primary research interest is how the historical and geographical knowledge regarding China’s southern frontier was produced, transmitted, and cognized in late imperial China.
Feng He
Feng He is a PhD candidate at the Institute of East Asian Art History, University of Heidelberg, and a doctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence 'Asia and Europe in a Global Context'. Formerly an Assistant Curator at Museum of Shanghai University, he is now writing a doctoral thesis on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European appropriation of Chinese narrative motifs in court workshops and ceramic manufactories, and on the role of East Asian monumental porcelain in the reshaping of European antiquarianism. Research interests include East Asian art and material culture, global histories of ceramics, antiquarianism and monumentality, agency and (trans)cultural biography of objects, historical and cultural sociology.
John 'Jake' Grefenstette
John 'Jake' Grefenstette graduated with a BA in Theology from the honors program at the University of Notre Dame, which included one year of undergraduate studies as a visiting student at Oriel College, Oxford. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa as a Dean’s Fellow and Hesburgh-Yusko Scholar from Notre Dame, Jake was named a Yenching Scholar at Peking University, where he focused his studies on the modern poet Hai Zi under Professors Xi Chuan and Cheng Lesong. During his time at Yenching, Jake received a research grant to travel to Qingdao and Shanghai to study the origins of Chinese cinema. Jake completed his studies in the top ten in his class and received the Yenching Academy Award for Outstanding Academic Performance. Jake is currently a Chinese FLAS Fellow and MA candidate in Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture at the University of Chicago.
Oliver Hargrave
Oliver Hargrave completed an undergraduate degree in Chinese (modern and classical) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2016. His undergraduate dissertation focused on a 17th century vernacular novel that the majority of scholars since Lu Xun have categorised as a ‘satire’. However, he was able to show that the Chinese term for satire (fengci 諷刺) was a returned graphic loan from Japanese and its usage as satire was highly unlikely to pre-date the 19th century. He also founded the Classical Chinese Society at SOAS. He is now doing an MSt in Traditional China at Oxford, where he is researching the mytho-geographical text The Classic of Divine Marvels and its relation to the ‘records of the strange’ (zhiguai 志怪) literary genre. He was awarded the Oxford-Ko graduate scholarship in 2017.
Lehyla G. Heward
Lehyla G. Heward is a second-year doctoral candidate at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on re-examining the various intercultural and transcultural writing practices in 1930-40s Manchuria, paying particular attention to Chinese and Korean intellectuals of the period. She received her Master’s in Modern Chinese Literature from Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China. Her research therefore holds personal significance since Changchun was the capital city of the Manchukuo puppet state from 1931-1945. During her Master’s, she studied the economic implications of Mo Yan’s fictional works and their English translations. Lehyla is originally from the United States’ southwest, and she received her Bachelor’s in English Literature from Arizona State University.
Xiaobai Hu
Xiaobai Hu is a third-year PhD student at University of Pennsylvania, History Department. He got his bachelor and master degrees from Nanjing University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology respectively in 2012 and 2014. He worked as a research assistant in City University of Hong Kong for one year prior to his arrival to the U.S. His current research interest lies in Chinese frontier history during the Ming-Qing period. The current (and provisional) research topic for his PhD dissertation is the cultural and social interactions between Ming China and Tibet and how the Chinese and Tibetan ethnocultural spheres took shape. Through a frontier history perspective, he grants centrality to the Chinese-Tibetan borderland society as one way to escape the center-periphery dichotomy. His language abilities in Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian enable him to consult multi-language primary sources that he collected from field work to tell a bottom-up story, which brings nuances to the historiographical impasse entangled with contemporary political and ideological disputes.
Alessandra Jonkhout
Alessandra Jonkhout is a MRes student in Asian Studies at the University of Leiden. In 2017, she received her BA in International Studies at the University of Leiden where she focused on politics, culture, and history in the East Asian region. During her BA, she also spent one semester at the University of Hong Kong studying sociology and history. Her research interests include Chinese politics, political communication, new media, and collective identity formation. She is particularly interested in using interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how new media affect political spaces in China. So far, this has resulted in her BA thesis where she positioned reality television within the debate on China’s media marketization. Currently, she is working as a student research assistant to map the use of social media during the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the 2014 Sun Flower Movement in Taiwan.
Jan Karlach
Jan Karlach (1983) received his undergraduate training in the field of Chinese Studies at Charles University in Prague. His long-term specialization and interest lie in the region of Southwest China, which he researches mainly from historical and anthropological perspectives. In his PhD dissertation, using ethnographic and dialogical approaches, he focuses on the Nuosu-Yi ritual specialists (bimo, suni, monyi) of southwestern Sichuan Province (Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture) and the ways in which they develop their alternative, “gray area” modernity.
Emmelie Korell
Working as a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin, Emmelie is currently writing her PhD thesis on “Images of Tibet in Chinese Popular Culture since 1949” at the Institute of China Studies. She earned her Bachelor and Master degrees in Sinology in Heidelberg, and during her studies (as well as later) spent time at Shanghai International Studies University, Tongji University, and Jiaotong University. Her Bachelor and Master theses in Heidelberg each addressed tourism in China and the related image-creation and travel practices. These issues have since remained her central research interests. A shortened version of her Master thesis was published in 2015 (“Constructing Identity in Tourism: The Transformation of Zhongdian County into Shangri-La”, Berliner China-Hefte, Vol.45); while another forthcoming paper (“Narrating Religion for Tourists: Tourist guidebooks’ depictions of Ganden Sumtseling Monastery in Xianggelila County, Yunnan”) also works with guidebooks as a central source.
Li Yingyu
Li Yingyu graduated from Tsinghua University in China and is now a graduate student in the department of Chinese language and literature of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, pursuing a Master's degree of philosophy in arts. Her tutor Professor Hua Wei is a world renowned scholar of Chinese traditional opera during the Ming and Qing dynasties. She is currently studying drama commentaries of Feng Menglong (1574-1646), a famous litterateur during the Ming who recomposed and created many traditional operas with pingdian (a traditional Chinese literary commentary).
Lin Yuyi
Lin Yuyi Korea University M.S., Department of Korea Literature in Classical Chinese Honors: The Korean Government Scholarship Program for Master’s Degree National Chengchi UniversityB.S., Department of Korean Language and Culture (Major) Department of Chinese Literature (Double Major) Department of Japanese (Minor) Present Affiliation Korea University PhD student, Department of Korea Literature in Classical Chinese National Chengchi University Researcher, Center for Korean Culture and Language Education Studies Research Area Sinitic texts (域外漢籍), Yeon-Hang-Rok (燕行錄, Travel Account to Beijing), Korea Literature in Classical Chinese (韓國漢文學), Cultural Interaction in East Asia (東亞交涉).
Zihao Lin
Zihao Lin is a graduate student at the Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin, where he is currently writing his Master thesis on the making of deaf collectivity in the post-reform People's Republic of China. Since April 2016, he serves as a student assistant to Prof. Klaus Mühlhahn’s research project (Adaptation and Legitimation as Factors of Effective Governance in China, 1949-1957) at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 700, Berlin. He has previously studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Fu-jen Catholic University in Taipei, and University of Helsinki in Finland with a broad interest in contemporary Chinese media systems and cultural politics. His recent co-authored paper Political Communication Chinese Style: The Elite Network in State-Regulated Weibo was awarded the best poster prize at the Second Conference for Student Research, Humboldt University of Berlin, and is submitted for publication in an edited volume.
Jingyu Liu
Jingyu Liu is a PhD student at the Institute of History and Culture in Southwest University, China and a research staff member of the Chongqing Collaborative Innovation Center for Research of the Rear Area during the Anti-Japanese War. She got her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and Chongqing University respectively. Her research focuses on Chinese modern history from the perspective of historiophoty. She is currently leading a research project of collection and research on overseas archives related to wartime capital of China and images on WWⅡ in China. She is also co-writing a book titled 'Kukan' and War-time Chongqing: the War-time Capital from the Perspective of Historiophoty. Prior to her PhD, she was working in preservation and utilization of modern historical buildings in Chongqing.
Luan Qinglin
Luan Qinglin is a first-year PhD student from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Qinglin’s current research interests include social movements, political sociology, gender, and modern Chinese history. Qinglin holds a Master’s degree in sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor’s degree in sociology from Xi’an Jiaotong University. Qinglin’s Master's dissertation discusses the social background and the intergenerational capital transmission of the Chinese Communist Party members in contemporary China. Qinglin currently serves as a board member of the Society of East Asian Studies at UIUC.
Alexandre Morton-Guermouche
Alexandre Morton-Guermouche is an American graduate student at Renmin University in Beijing, China, currently in his final semester of study for completion of his Master’s degree in Chinese Politics in the Contemporary Chinese Studies Program (CCSP) sponsored by the Renmin University International Relations Department. Since completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a double-major in History and Chinese, his research has focused primarily on modern Sino-US relations, as well as Chinese domestic and foreign policy, with presentations as a guest speaker at the University of Chicago and the University of Denver in Colorado. Primary works influencing his education have come from notable authors, John K. Fairbanks, Mark Edgar Lewis, and Michael Loewe. His current research focuses on the emergence of the Western medical industry in China and its predicted socioeconomic impacts in the next decade. The paper he will be presenting at the conference was originally submitted and presented to the University of Texas Asian Studies Department in 2014.
Drayson Netzel-Wood
Drayson Netzel-Wood was born and raised in Canada. He received his BA in International Relations at the University of British Columbia. During his undergraduate studies, he participated in a year-long exchange at Fudan University, Shanghai, whereafter he was selected to participate in a six-month internship in the Political and Diplomatic Section of the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai. After graduating from the University of British Columbia, he returned to Shanghai to pursue a one-year Chinese language program at Jiaotong University. He is now in his second year of an MA in Chinese Philosophy at Fudan University, and is set to graduate in June 2018. His primary interests are Chinese antiquity, early Confucian thought, Neo-Confucian philosophy, Chinese intellectual history, and Sino-Christian comparative philosophy. He is presently applying for PhD programs related to Chinese philosophy.
Nie Lina
Nie Lina received her B.A. in Chinese History and Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong and is currently continuing with graduate study in the Regional Studies East Asia program at Harvard University. Her major research interests include the social and cultural history of China and Japan. She has published journal articles in both Chinese and English on Sino-Japanese history.
Bocheng Pan
Bocheng Pan is a PhD student in cultural studies (cultural history) at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, and currently working on cultural landscapes and travel culture in the post-1949 Chinese cities. He has presented his research at several conferences or workshops hosted by the Department of History at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ironbridge International In- stitute for Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham. He is also interested in the theory of collective memory and social memory and has published two book reviews in Chinese-language journals.
Yiying Pan
I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at The University of Chicago. I am working on a dissertation project that examines the transformation of spatial orders in eastern and northeastern Sichuan from 1723 to 1864. By combining state-level official documents with local materials such as county-level archives, genealogies, tomb relics, and steles, my dissertation aims to illustrate how interactions among state-level institutions, daily social experiences, and generalized knowledge making shaped and ordered an under-governed space like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eastern Sichuan. Grounded on such a central concern for mechanisms of space-making, my dissertation also inquires related processes of community-making and identity-making. Aside from this specific research project, I have broader interests in topic like empire building, long-distance migration, and the construction of cultural identity in Ming and Qing China.
Vaishnavi Patil
Vaishnavi Patil is currently a student at the Yenching Academy of Peking University, pursuing a Master's degree in China Studies, with concentration on History and Archaeology. She is a recipient of the Yenching Scholarship, awarded to international students to pursue a Master's degree in China Studies at Peking University. Prior to this, she completed a Master's in History of Art from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2015, where she studied Chinese paintings, calligraphy, and ceramics along with Western art theory. Her thesis, titled China Meets West: Understanding Cross-cultural Artistic Interactions Through the Battle Scenes of the Qianlong Emperor, examined the European artistic influences seen in the Qing court art of the 18th century. She received her Bachelor's degree from St. Xavier’s College Autonomous, Mumbai studying Ancient Indian History and Archaeology.
Tsering Samdrup
Tsering Samdrup is currently finishing an MA in east Asian culture and history at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is currently studying the history and dialects of Amdo Tibetans. He has published dozens of poems and essays in the Tibetan language in literary magazines in Tibet. He holds a BA in cultural anthropology from Duke University and was a field representative in Tibet for the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (formerly Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center) based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Shao Liang
Shao Liang received his Bachelor's degree from China Agricultural University in 2014. In 2016, he was at the University of Oxford for short-term study. In 2017, he completed his Master's degree in Chinese history at Renmin University, Beijing, China with a dissertation titled Han Dynasty Political Practices and Regional Identity Changes. The paper for this conference comes from his master dissertation, which was fully approved by the dissertation committee which consisted of several Chinese history professors at Renmin University. Now, Shao Liang takes part in an internship related to his major in the Gaoli Institute in Renmin University and is preparing his application for a PhD. His main research interests are history theory and the history of the Qin and Han dynasties.
Lauren Walden
Lauren Walden received her BA degree in Modern and Medieval Languages (French and Spanish) at the University of Cambridge. She then undertook a Masters in Museum Studies at the University of Newcastle. Currently, she is the recipient of a Special Exhibition Scholarship at Coventry University for a fully-funded PhD in Art History. Her research elaborates a re-writing of surrealism’s cultural memory as cosmopolitan and contains a chapter on Chinese photographer Lang Jingshan (郎静山). She has been studying Chinese for 2 years alongside her Phd and passed the advanced HSK 5 (C1) in April 2017. She hopes to pass HSK 6 before the end of her doctoral studies. She has been awarded a British Council Steward-research fellowship for the 2017 Venice Biennale in October and will explore the work of Guan Xiao in relation to cosmopolitanism. For a list of publications please visit: https://coventry.academia.edu/LaurenWalden.
Min-Erh Wang
Min-Erh Wang is a DPhil student in music from the University of Oxford, working under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Grimley. He got his master degree from National Taiwan University. Min-Erh’s research interest mainly focuses on the reception of Western art music in Asian contexts in the 20th century. His master thesis discusses the historical background of contemporary Chinese orchestra and its current development in Taiwan. His current doctoral project is related to Pablo Casals, a prominent Spanish cellist and humanitarian, and the different receptions of his work in the Chinese speaking territories within the global Cold War regime. In the past few years, Min-Erh has presented papers at musicological conferences, including the 43rd ICTM world conference in 2015 in Astana, Kazakhstan and the 20th IMS quinquennial congress in 2017 in Tokyo, Japan. In the future, Min-Erh will keep working on musicological studies with an interdisciplinary perspective and methodology.
Yingzi Wang
Yingzi Wang is a third-year PhD student at the History Department of SOAS, University of London. Yingzi received a Bachelor's degree (2013) in History from Minzu University of China, and a Master's degree (2015) from Durham University in History as well. Yingzi's current PhD project is titled From ‘Ancestral Home’ to ‘China’s North-East’: the Transition of Manchuria into an Integral Part of ‘China’ in the Early Twentieth Century, a part of which will be presented at the conference. Yingzi's research interests lie with ethnicity and ethnic relationships in modern China, Manchu studies, frontier studies in East Asia and Late Qing Reform.
Ting-chih Wu
Ting-chih Wu is reading for a PhD in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Ting-chih received his BA and MA degrees in History from National Taiwan University. His Master thesis focuses on the image of war and the conflict at China’s northwestern border in Northern Song China. Right now his primary research interests center on borderland spaces in the middle period, especially in the 14th to the 16th centuries. He plans to explore how Chinese people’s perception of nature affected their border policies in the Ming period.
Yang Yi
Yang Yi is a doctoral candidate in the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong, and currently conducting her research as a visiting fellow at Academia Sinica. Her research interests include overseas Chinese literature and comparative literature. She has published dozens of essays in both Chinese and English academic journals, and was awarded the National Scholarship in China and the 15th Singapore Tertiary Chinese Literature Awards, Awards for Creative Writing in Chinese in 2016. She is a recipient of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship and the Louis Cha Post-graduate Research Fellowship.
Shensi Yi
Shensi Yi is currently a PhD student of the History Department at the University of Sydney, working on modern Chinese history, with specialisation in modern Shanghai history and the Chinese Communist history prior to the founding of the P.R.C. His PhD thesis focuses on the everyday life of the Shanghai communists in the international context before 1949, incorporating cultural and social history as well as engaging with multi-archival and multi-linguistic materials. He published and edited a few articles and books on modern Shanghai history while he was working as an assistant researcher in the Centre for Modern Shanghai Studies (Shanghai) from 2013 to 2015. In 2016, he won a fellowship from the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) to conduct research in Canberra.
Yu Yusen
Yu Yusen has been a PhD candidate at Heidelberg University, Germany, since October 2014. His PhD dissertation discusses the Persianate reception of Chinese arts in the Timurid period. He obtained his BA in History from Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and subsequently his MA in Islamic art history at SOAS, London. In 2013 and 2014, he studied Persian history at the University of Tehran, Iran. His areas of interest span the fields of Islamic and Chinese studies, including history and culture of Mongol Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and India; the reception of Chinese art at and beyond the borders of China; and the Silk Road studies.
Zhou Si
Zhou Si is a PhD candidate in the department of Chinese Studies of National University of Singapore. She received a BA from Fudan University (Chinese Language and Literature) and a MA from Washington University in St. Louis (East Asian Studies). She is interested in twentieth-century Chinese literature, film and culture. Her MA thesis An Odyssey Abroad and Back: The Travelling Identity in 'Happy Together' and 'What Time Is It There' examines the changing self-identification in the context of globalization by comparing the films directed by Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Mingliang. Her doctoral dissertation Children and Nationality: the 'New Enlightenment' Culture in the 1980s China is a historical enquiry into the discourse of 'new enlightenment' in the Chinese literary and media culture of the 1980s, particularly as refracted through the works about children. She also maintains active interests in writing and translating poems.
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