Student Affiliates Archive

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

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

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 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’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

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 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

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

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

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 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

Years of Affiliation: 2016-2017
Rui is a PhD candidate of History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, and is on track to graduate soon. With a postdoctoral fellowship in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, he is writing his firstRead More

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

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

Years of Affiliation: Graduate Student Associate from 2017-2018

Research Interests: Chinese foreign policy, international security, domestic institutions