Student Affiliates Archive

Graham Chamness
Ph.D. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Years of Affiliation: 2016-2018
Graham Chamness is working toward completing his dissertation. His research considers how literature shapes conceptions of belonging to a shared, common culture. Specifically he is examining the way the literati of fourth century China living in theRead More

Guangchen Chen
Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature
Years of Affiliation: 2016-2017
Guangchen Chen is a 6th year Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature finishing his dissertation entitled “Playing with Things: Collecting as a Materialistic Response to Modernity in China.” Conceptualizing collecting as a discursive thought process that disruptsRead More

Heng Du 杜恆
University of Arizona, Assistant Professor
Years of Affiliation: Graduate Student Associate 2016-2018, Visiting Scholar 2020-2021
Heng Du is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. She is a book historian specializing in the study of Early China. AtRead More

Ruodi Duan 段若迪
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History
Ruodi Duan will spend the Fall 2018 semester at Fudan University working on her dissertation, “Acts of Friendship: The Politics of Afro-Asian Solidarity, 1963-1974.” In her dissertation, Ruodi takes three nodes—socialist Tanzania, Maoist China, and the transnational African American left—asRead More

Joshua Freeman 乔舒亚•弗里曼
Ph.D. Candidate, Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies
Joshua Freeman’s dissertation, “Print Communism: Uyghur Official Culture Between China and the USSR,” demonstrates that socialist policies, implemented in China’s northwest borderlands long before the founding of the People’s Republic of China enabled the small Sino-Soviet frontier community of IliRead More

William French
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Years of Affiliation: 2017-2018
William French studies ancient Chinese texts, investigating how they were read in antiquity and what this tells us about early modes of thought. In his dissertation, William examines the quotation of authoritative or canonical texts (suchRead More

Ze Fu 付泽
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Government
Ze Fu will travel to China to conduct fieldwork for her dissertation, entitled “The Cultural Logic of Local Governance: A Comparison between Jiaodong Peninsula and Western Shandong.” Her research examines the mechanisms by which a particular cultural system, or aRead More

Yichen Guan
Ph.D. Candidate, Government
Dates of Affiliation: Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellow 2017-18
Yichen Guan is conducting research surrounding a central question: does minority education encourage ethnic minorities’ political participation in China? To address this question, she will conduct a survey and in-depth caseRead More



Jingkai He
Ph.D. Candidate, Government
Dates of Affiliation: Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellow, 2017-18
Jingkai will be conducting a 9-month research project in China, as part of a cross-national study, to explain authoritarian regimes’ ability to manage domestic popular threats, which is a crucial factorRead More


Jasmine Hu
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature
Years of Affiliation: 2017-2018
Jasmine Hu’s dissertation project surveys Chinese literary production from the events of the An Lushan Rebellion to the early Northern Song. She examines the emergence of what came to be known as the ci poetry genre,Read More


Xiaoqian Hu 胡小倩
S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School
Xiaoqian Hu is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. Her doctoral dissertation, “Property, Authority, and China’s Rural Transformation,” examines property struggles in rural China as it undergoes agricultural industrialization, rural exodus, and urbanization. Blending ethnography with legal theory, sheRead More


Rui Hua
Ph.D. Candidate, History and East Asian Languages
Years of Affiliation: 2016-2017
Rui Hua studies late imperial and modern Chinese history and, after numerous archival trips to Northeast China, is beginning to write his dissertation. HIs dissertation is tentatively entitled ”The Defiant Manchukuo: Sino-Russo-Japanese collaboration and the makingRead More


Bing Huang 黃冰
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of the History of Art and Architecture
Years of Affiliation: 2017-2018
Bing Huang is a PhD candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation concerns the visual and material repercussions of China’s encounters with European scientific devices during the eighteenth century. It seeksRead More


Rujing Huang 黃儒菁
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Music
Years of Affiliation: 2017-2018
Rujing Huang is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology working towards completing her dissertation. Her work examines the hitherto unstudied, twenty-first century revivals of yayue, ritual music historically performed in the courts of ancient and imperial China.Read More


Lu Kou 寇陆
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Years of Affiliation: 2016-2018
Lu Kou is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese literature finishing his dissertation entitled “Courtly Exchange and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Early Medieval China.” This project examines inter-court communication during the period of division (also knownRead More