About
Current research interests:
I am a scholar of modern Asian cultural studies and performance, with a focus on Chinese dance and theater in transnational perspective. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I work across the fields of modern Chinese studies, dance and performance studies, and cultural history. My current research projects focus on the intersections of performance, social movements, and transnational exchange. A complete list of my past and forthcoming publications can be found here.
Current projects:
I am currently working on two monographs, one focused on the relationship between dance and socialist culture in the People’s Republic of China, and the second focused on the transnational movements of Asian women dancers during the 1930s-1960s. The first project received an International and Area Studies Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2014-2015. The second was the recipient of a Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar award as part of the “Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections” project in 2016-17.
My first monograph, tentatively titled Revolutionary Bodies: Dance and China’s Socialist Legacy, is the first critical, archive-based study of dance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Grounding dance within Chinese and transnational cultural history, the book analyzes the work of major Chinese choreographers from 1935 to 2015, reconstructing the history of concert dance during China’s socialist and post-socialist periods. The book challenges a Eurocentric logic that reduces Chinese dance history to a series of “Western influences,” by instead highlighting the agency of Chinese dancers and the importance of transnational networks connecting diverse communities in the Global South. Revolutionary Bodies counters the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballet constitutes the primary legacy of Chinese socialism in the dance field. Rather, it uncovers a dynamic history of indigenous dance experiments, which resulted in new dance genres widely practiced in China, Taiwan, and much of the Chinese diaspora today.
My second monograph, tentatively titled Choreographing Asia: Women Dancers, Convergent Transnationalisms, and Cultural Exchange examines relationships among gender, ethnicity, and place through the biographies of influential Asian women dancers whose lives transcended national and ethnic boundaries and made important contributions to the formation of twentieth-century anti-colonial Asian dance modernisms. Linking cultural networks from the Chinese Caribbean to Soviet Central Asia, the Japanese empire, and Bandung Afro-Asianism, the book demonstrates how Asian woman dancers created and traversed transnational networks of cultural exchange long before the current age of globalization.
Other activites:
Since coming to U-M in 2013, I have led several projects focused on outreach and development in the emerging field of East Asian dance studies. Between 2014 and 2016, seven short- and long-term residencies brought visiting dance artists and scholars of Chinese dance and Japanese dance to offer workshops, performances, and lectures for students and the broader U-M community. In collaboration with the U-M Asia Library, I developed the “Pioneers of Chinese Dance Digital Archive,” a digital humanities resource containing over 1,500 digitized rare and historical photographs. I also co-curated the exhibit “Chinese Dance: National Movements in a Revolutionary Age, 1945-1965,” held at the U-M on March 1-May 15, 2017. In April, 2017, the international conference “Dancing East Asia: Critical Choreographies and Their Corporeal Politics” will bring together scholars of Chinese, Japanese, North and South Korean, and Taiwanese dance studies, with the goal of publishing the first edited English-language anthology of scholarly essays on dance in the East Asian region. At the national level, I have served as President of the Association for Asian Performance and a Board Member in the Society of Dance History Scholars.
Teaching Interests:
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses and advise graduate research in the fields of modern Chinese studies, Asian studies, and performance studies. Graduate seminars I am teaching currently include “Rethinking China After 1949: New Approaches in PRC Cultural Studies” and “Critical Studies in Asian Performance: Indonesia and China.” A complete list of my past and current courses can be found here. Apart from the PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures, I also advise students in the MA in China Studies and the Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies. I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in any of these programs.
