University of Oxford China Humanities Graduate Conference 2017
(Extra)ordinary China: Practices of the Everyday
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Graduate Speaker Bios
Maria-Caterina Bellinetti is a PhD candidate at the School of Culture & Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on how the CCP used photography as a propaganda tool during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). She received an MChS in Chinese Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2013. Prior to this, she completed a BA in East Asian Languages and Culture (2005-08) and an MA in International Relations (2008-10), both at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice). She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in History of Art, and she previously worked as Editorial Assistant for the CPI Blog (April 2015-16). In early 2016, she was awarded two research travel grants: the first from the UCCL, the second from the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.
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Jennifer Bond is currently in her third year of doctoral studies at SOAS, University of London, (funded by the AHRC) supervised by Dr. Andrea Janku. Her PhD explores the educational experiences of female missionary school pupils in East China, 1917-1949. She completed her BA hons (first class) from Warwick University in 2010 and MA in History (distinction) in 2011. Her interest in modern Chinese history led her to undertake an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at Oxford University in 2012-2013 (funded by the AHRC), including a term at Peking University in 2012. She also undertook one year of intensive Mandarin study at Zhejiang University in 2013-2014 funded by a Chinese Government Scholarship. In 2015-2016, she completed her PhD fieldwork based at East China Normal University (ECNU), funded by a Confucius Institute scholarship.
Allison Bernard is a doctoral candidate (ABD) at Columbia University studying pre-modern Chinese literature. Her research interests include the intersections of literary and historical writing, book history and print culture, and the world of Chinese theatre. Her dissertation engages the literary world of Kong Shangren’s seminal play The Peach Blossom Fan, using the play and its network of related texts to examine ideological/ philosophical resonances among stage, society, and writerly legacy. Before joining Columbia’s PhD program in the fall of 2012, Allison received her BA from Middlebury College (2010) and an MA from Columbia’s EALAC department (2012). She also has interests in Japanese theatre, poetry, art history, and media studies.
Keru Cai is currently in the third year of her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, working with Andrew Jones, Sophie Volpp, Irina Paperno, and Harsha Ram. Her research examines modern Chinese reworking of realism(s) from Russia, England, and France. Previously, she completed a BA in English Literature at Harvard University, where she graduated summa cum laude. Subsequently, she was awarded a Von Clemm Fellowship to pursue a Master of Studies in English Literature (nineteenth-century) at the University of Oxford. Written under the guidance of Professor Stephen Gill, her Master's thesis explored the resonances of Walter Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance in Thomas Hardy’s novels. Afterwards, she explored her interests in Chinese Literature in the Harvard University Regional Studies: East Asia Masters program, where Professor Wai-yee Li was her advisor. She wrote her Master's thesis about Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi and Herbert Giles’s 1880 translation into English.
Huiying Chen is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Under the direction of Professor Laura Hostetler, her dissertation studies the history of travel in eighteenth-century China and focusses on a series of commercial travel guides. This year, with the support of a Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, she is visiting archives and libraries to consult different editions of the travel guides and other related primary sources. Huiying has gained a BA in English Literature with a double major in Economics from Tsinghua University. Afterwards, she took a Masters degree from the University of Chicago.
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Anne Feng is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include religious murals, Pure Land Buddhism, Dunhuang art, and Japanese Buddhist painting. She received her BA with Honors from New York University in 2010. In 2008, Anne interned at the Palace Museum, Beijing for exhibitions on Qing dynasty court costume. She was a research intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the special exhibition The World of Kublai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty (2010). She has participated in collaborative research projects at the Dunhuang Academy with the support of the Fulbright IIE Fellowship 2014-2015. At the University of Chicago, she has organised the Contemporary Chinese Art Yearbook and was also the coordinator for the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia workshop. Currently, she is the Andrew W. Mellon COSI Curatorial Fellow at the Asian Art department of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Feng He is a PhD Candidate at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany. In the Institute of East Asian Art History, Feng’s dissertation focuses on pictorial narrative patterns of Chinese porcelain produced in Jingdezhen during the Transitional and Kangxi period (1620-1722). As a member of the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies in the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’, his research touches on the appropriation and re-creation of Chinese narrative motifs in European decorative arts. As an art historian by training, Feng also strives to see artefacts from sociological and anthropological perspectives.
Before coming to Heidelberg, Feng was an assistant researcher in the Museum of Shanghai University, with expertise in Chinese ceramics. He has curated exhibitions, and edited catalogues and museum journals. He obtained his BA (thesis with Honours) in Art History from Southeast University, and took an MA in Art History from Shanghai University.
Roberto Figliulo studied at the University of Bologna, where he obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Asian Studies. His research work has always been focused on Chinese art, with particular attention to photographic production. In 2016, he concluded his doctoral research at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. In his PhD dissertation, he analyses how Chinese photographers present the relationship between public and private spaces in contemporary China. He is now a Professor of Chinese art for the Master’s in Chinese Studies at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and for the Bachelor’s Degree in East Asian Studies of the Universitat Autònoma in Barcelona.
Guttorm Norberg Gundersen is a second-year graduate student in the East Asian Culture and History MPhil program at the University of Oslo, where he is currently engaged in a project concerning the earliest strata of indigenously articulated instructions on Buddhist meditation in China. He is also the Program Director for the Buddhist educational NGO, The Woodenfish Foundation, that organises academic programs in China relating to Chinese Buddhism, past and present. He has previously studied at Peking University in Beijing, National Taiwan University in Taipei, and Ryukoku University in Kyoto.
Jiang Chenxin is a PhD student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Most of her work focuses on the history of cultural hybridity in literary encounters between China and the West. Other interests include modern censorship regimes, Chinese concessions and treaty ports, literary form in philosophical texts, poetic form, and the practice of translation. She was born in Singapore, grew up in Hong Kong, and majored in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She holds a 2016-2017 DAAD fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. She also works as a literary translator; her last book was The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin (New York Review Books, 2016).
Benjamin Kindler is currently a PhD student in Modern Chinese Literature at Columbia University, studying under Professor Lydia Liu. He is preparing a dissertation on the changing configuration of creative labour in modern Chinese aesthetics and cultural production, encompassing the 1920s up to the early socialist period. Before coming to Columbia, he undertook a BA in Modern History and Politics at Mansfield College, Oxford University, and an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at Balliol College, Oxford University. As an MPhil student, he completed a dissertation on the role of the grotesque in the fiction of Qian Zhongshu, studying under Professor Margaret Hillenbrand. His scholarly interests include imaginaries of labour in modern China, Cold War-era socialist internationalism, and New Left cultural critique in the contemporary People's Republic.
Xiaoxin Li is a current PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. Her research topic examines designs of Cantonese-style furniture and the material culture of Qing dynasty Canton (Guangzhou). Prior to her doctoral studies, she was Assistant Curator for East Asian collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she contributed to various projects, including the refurbishment of the Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art. She also curated the Malcolm Macdonald Gallery of Chinese Art and Archaeology at Durham University Oriental Museum, where she was Collections Assistant of the Chinese collection. Xiaoxin received her Master’s degree in Art Museum and Gallery Studies at Leicester University.
Yvonne Lin is an MSt candidate in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Margaret Hillenbrand. Her current research examines nostalgia as a performative act in Bai Xianyong’s Taipei People and Zhu Tianxin’s The Old Capital. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she studied Comparative Literature and French Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, after which she spent a few years teaching both in the United States and in China. Her academic interests include twentieth-century literature, comparative literature, Sinophone studies, visual culture, modernity, and critical theory.
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Chang Liu is currently a final year PhD student at King’s College London. She obtained a BA degree from East China Normal University, and a MSt in Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford. She is currently co-organising the Refracting Gender in Modern China Workshop with support from SOAS, London Confucius Institute and the Sino-British Fellowship Trust.
Fully sponsored by the Chinese Scholarship Council, her research examines single women - unmarried and adult - to explore how, why, and when the concept of ‘singleness’ underwent dramatic changes in urban Shanghai between 1915 and 1949. By focusing on more ‘ordinary’ single females of the emerging urban middle classes who sought to become teachers, doctors, nurses, bank clerks, functionaries and salesgirls in Shanghai, her thesis argues that the changing concept of single women was articulated around a new lifestyle of independent singleness.
Di Lu is just starting her third year of PhD study in Art and Design at the Birmingham School of Art (BCU), focussing on urbanisation in China and contemporary Chinese photography. She has been a student academic partner of the Chinese Contemporary Arts Center (CCVA) from 2015 to 2016. She took an MA in Visual Communication from Birmingham City University (BIAD), and a BA in Graphic Communication from the University of Northampton. Her interests lie in contemporary art, and she likes exploring her ideas through personal experience with all kinds of media, especially photography.
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Wentao Ma is an MA candidate in the Film and Media Studies program at Columbia University. He is also a Research Assistant in the department, assisting the research of Professor Rob King’s new book, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture, 1926-1939. Wentao’s research interests are mainly focussed on body culture and national ideology, feminism and popular culture, and Chinese masculinity in contemporary Chinese cinema.
Pete Millwood is a DPhil candidate in History at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis examines how transnational cultural and academic exchanges influenced diplomacy between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s. He is broadly interested in relations between America and the Chinese world, as well as in the role of transnational and non-state actors in diplomacy. He conducted the archival work towards his doctoral thesis while holding pre-doctoral fellowships at Peking University in Beijing and at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. He has degrees from LSE and Oxford.
Arjen Nauta is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. His project on Hunan Satellite Television is part of the ERC-funded ‘China Creative’-project, led by Professor Jeroen de Kloet. He obtained a research Master’s degree in Religion and Culture and two Bachelor degrees (in History and Religious Anthropology) at the University of Groningen. In addition, he received a Master’s degree in China and Asia-Pacific Studies from National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. From August 2015 onwards, Arjen resides for two years in Changsha, Hunan, to carry out his fieldwork at HSTV.
Poon Soon Yi received her BA in Chinese Studies (major) and Economics (minor) at University of Malaya (2012).Currently, she is an MA candidate in the Department of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University. Her current research focuses on modern Chinese literature and contemporary Chinese literature. Her other research interests include visual culture, critical theory, and gender studies.
L. Odila Schröder is currently pursuing an MA in Chinese and Transcultural Studies at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University. She obtained her BA in Chinese Studies and Politics from Heidelberg University in 2014. She studied Chinese at Tsinghua University between 2009-2010 and visited Cambridge University between 2012-2013 to study Chinese, History, and Philosophy of Science. She is also a singer and an enthusiast of Contemporary Music.
Josiah Stork began his undergraduate career at Middlebury College in the fall of 2011. He graduated in the summer of 2015 magna cum laude and with Highest Honors from the Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese. Josiah spent the 2015-2016 academic year teaching English in China and Chinese in the US. He is currently working on a Master’s degree in Chinese through the Middlebury Language Schools in conjunction with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey California.
Emily Teo is a historian and student of the Text and Event in Early Modern Europe PhD programme at the University of Kent and the Free University of Berlin. Her supervisors are Professor Klaus Mühlhahn and Professor Bernhard Klein. Her PhD project studies the travel texts of European and Chinese travel writers who were travelling in late-Ming China between 1550 and 1644, including the works of renowned late-Ming traveller Xu Xiake and the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. She is also interested in social history, landscape studies, material culture, and historiography. She graduated from the National University of Singapore with a B.A. (Hons) in European Studies, and took her Masters in Global Studies from the Universität Wien and Universität Leipzig.
Laura Vermeeren is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and is part of the ‘China Creative' research group. Her research is concerned with how Chinese calligraphy is entangled with technologies of the self, government, and society in contemporary China. Previously, she completed a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Chinese Studies at Leiden University.
Wai Cheuk Yee is an MPhil student in Gender Studies from the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies in The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), supervised by Professor Tam Wai Lun and Professor Huang Weishan. She had previously received her B.A. (Hons) degree in Religious Studies also from CUHK. She is currently researching late Imperial Chinese vernacular erotic novels, with a focus on the Buddhist and Daoist elements that frequent the texts and their relationship with Chinese eroticism. Her research interests includes sexuality and literature, the representation of religion in popular culture, and subcultures.
Ching Kit Wu was born and raised in Hong Kong before he moved to the USA for high school. He obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and an MA in Philosophy from Tsinghua University He worked as a research assistant at Peking University from 2012-13. His duties included holding conferences, preparing research materials, making coffee, and leading group discussions. He is currently a PhD student in History at the University of California, Berkeley. His main focus is in Chinese intellectual history, especially Confucianism.
Xiaoyu Xia studies late Imperial, modern, and contemporary Chinese literatures and cultures. Before coming to Berkeley, Xiaoyu received her academic training from Fudan University (MA in 2016 and BA in 2013), and has since maintained a long interest in modern poetry. Her current research focuses on the introduction of neurology to and the rise of “nervous sensibility” in late Imperial and modern China, with which she wants to consider the cross-boundary potentialities of literature and art. Her academic interests also include material culture, medical humanity, and war experience in East Asian and global contexts.
Xu Lufeng is studying for an MA in Chinese Studies at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, France. He holds a first MA in Sociology from the China University of Political Science and Law. He is a member of the China Folklore Society (CFS), and his research field is in religious anthropology and folklore.
Yingchuan Yang is being trained as a historian of modern China, particularly in the fledgeling years of the People’s Republic, under the supervision of Professor Eugenia Lean at Columbia University. His research probes the intersection of social history, cultural history, and the history of science, and investigates a history of radio that delineates a Chinese model of governmentality, shifting interpretations of the discourse of piracy, and the position of China in the global 1950s. His other ongoing projects include a reappraisal of socialist modernity in Beijing and a reconstruction of an educated youth’s (zhiqing) personal experience. A native of Dongcheng, Beijing, Yingchuan received his BA in History from UCLA in 2016.
Linda C. Zhang’s research focuses on the legibility of marginalised voices within contemporary Chinese cultural production. Her current projects focus on independent cinema, documentary film, local dialects, oral histories, as well as literary realism. Before coming to Berkeley, she finished a Master's degree in Chinese studies at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Duke University and then worked in nonprofit and education in mainland China for two years.
Yayun Zhu is a PhD candidate at the Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University. He has an MA in Japanese Literature from Waseda University. His dissertation focuses on the literary social networks and cultural scenes in Nanjing during the Ming-Qing transition.