Student Affiliates

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

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

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

Jingyu Liu’s dissertation centers on the prominence of salvation rites for the dead from the vantage point of the local regional religious history of the Jiangnan area during the Song dynasty (960-1276). Her work fills a gap in the studyRead More

Huijun Mai is currently working on her dissertation, “Thinking Things: Mediated Materiality in the Song (960-1279) Literary Culture.” Her work considers the rise of a ‘culture of things,’ specifically the material consciousness manifested in the popular literary discourses on commodities,Read More

Kyle Shernuk is working on his dissertation, entitled “Transculturating China: Ethnicity, Nation, and Chineseness at the Turn of the 21st Century.” His research focuses on the tension between the ideas of ethnicity and Chineseness in Sinographic literature. He argues thatRead More

Austin Strange’s dissertation examines how elite domestic politics and political legitimacy shaped late imperial China’s foreign economic policies, including its tribute and trade relations in East Asia. His work also explores how similar dynamics persist in contemporary international politics. Additionally,Read More

Saul Wilson will conduct fieldwork for his dissertation on the politics of urban planning in Chinese municipalities. His research seeks to understand how China’s sizable municipal bureaucracies function and interact with one another in the realm of urban planning. InRead More

Joel Wing-Lun is working on his dissertation, focusing on Chinese state expansion into what is now Guizhou Province, a mountainous and forbidding region on the empire’s southwest frontier, during the Ming and Qing dynasties. His research uses local village documentsRead More