The Fairbank Center is excited to award three doctoral students with Shum Fellowships supporting their research in China.
For the 2026-27 academic year, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies is pleased to support three students with Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellowships: Hagar Zheng Gal, Tcybzhid Tcybikova, and Kaixiao Liu.
Established in 2005, the Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellowship is the Fairbank Center’s most competitive grant funding award. The fellowships support doctoral students whose work aims to improve and sustain world-class research in China Studies while promoting greater understanding between the United States and China.
The Shum Fellowship enables doctoral students to travel to China for dissertation research. A Fairbank Center faculty committee typically selects candidates in social science fields such as government, public policy and administration, economics, sociology, and social history. We look forward to seeing our new Shum Fellows projects in the coming year.
New Shum Fellows 2026–27
Hagar Zheng Gal (鄭若水) is a Ph.D. candidate in Global History. Her research focuses on relations of political economy between the Qing and British Empires from the 19th to the early 20th centuries, largely through the opium trade linking the Qing interior to histories of Bombay and Portuguese India. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “The Long Arm of Malwa Opium: Transformations of Economic Lives in Qing and British Conquest Frontiers.” With Shum Fellowship funding, Gal will conduct further research in several archives in China.
Tcybzhid Tcybikova (田睿) is a Ph.D. candidate in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. Her dissertation examines the history of Tibetan medicine in late imperial and Soviet Inner Asia. Through oral histories, medical manuscripts, and archival work, her project traces the institutional and transregional networks through which medical knowledge circulated among physician-monks and Tibetan Buddhist institutions. During her Shum Fellowship, Tcybikova will be based at Inner Mongolia University to pursue fieldwork and archival research.
Kaixiao Liu (劉恺瀟) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government. His dissertation project studies why and how some rebel groups conduct revolutionary state-building efforts under strong incumbent threats and in territories they do not securely control. His research focuses on the organizational problem of how communist actors built governing institutions while fighting in contested territories during the Chinese Civil War, 1927-1937. The Shum Fellowship will enable Liu to pursue archival research in China and conduct field visits to former revolutionary base areas.