Doctoral Student in History
About
I work on Middle-Period Chinese history (800-1400) with a special focus on the dynamic interplays between text and space as well as on material culture. My master's thesis, titled "Gardens and the City: Literati Identity Building in the Mid-Northern Song," leverages gardens in Luoyang as a novel analytical lens to study literati identity building in the eleventh century. While working on this project, I developed a deep interest in investigating the entanglement between human and nature, and I want to extend the scope of my research to incorporate perspectives such as environmental history and new materialism(s) to challenge human-centered narrative.
I'm currently conducting research on the cultural history of decorated letter paper in Middle-Period China and Japan, and I'm hoping to expand the project into a comparative study with European parchment. I'm also working on a side project on seventeenth-century missionaries and their translations of the New Testament, especially from the perspective of food studies.
Besides research, I'm serving as a graduate student coordinator for the Forum for Research in Medieval Studies (FoRMS), and as a graduate student liaison for the Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Program.
