Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936), a prominent Chinese writer, holds a significant place in the annals of modern Chinese literature and pro-democracy movements due to his notable contributions. Consequently, his visual representations have been continuously reimagined by various groups for diverse purposes, making him a celebrated paragon in modern Chinese art...
Why do artists look to the past to find contemporary inspiration? This dissertation focuses on the reinventions and transformations of antiquity in the understudied genre known as bogu or “ancient erudition” paintings (博古图). Composite by nature, elements of archeology, epigraphy and as well as Western realism come together in these works forming mi...
This dissertation argues that the lingering influence of the literary Sinitic tradition destabilized the colonial construction of language-based identities while simultaneously precluding further possibilities for localized development. The Literary Sinitic writing system, with its non-phonographic properties, invites a unique form of engagement th...
This dissertation explores the transregional impacts of the 1949 Chinese communist revolution on diasporic Chinese students and scholars in Cold War Asia and Asian America. It argues that higher education was a key site of contestation in the U.S.-China Cold War tensions of the 1950s, where American efforts to contain and isolate communist China pr...
This dissertation interrogates the possibilities and limitations of tourism, particularly in the transimperial system of the postwar Pacific. It reframes Cold War US-Japan relations as symbiosis between two imperial nations. It examines post-World War II tourism to illustrate how the American and Japanese empires engaged in intellectual and populat...
This dissertation is a history of religion on the “peripheries” of the modern Chinese state, the Japanese wartime empire, and the Tibetan Geluk Buddhist world. Using a transnational history approach, the project uses multilingual source materials collected from archives located in China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States and challenges tradition...
“Ancient elite propaganda” can be defined as the institutional production of information in which ideological messages were communicated among elite groupings. During Late Antiquity, elite propaganda flourished in local areas of the Han Empire and the Roman Empire. Two such local areas, the Qing-Xu-Yan 青-徐-兗 region in China, from the Han period to ...
In this dissertation, I examine the development of psychiatry in the social and political context of South Korea. Although psychiatry was a product of the West that was introduced to Korea, the history of post-1945 Korea that I present reveals a multi-directional flow of ideas across regions. Drawing on extensive archival research, I explore the co...
“Schools of Violence” tells anew the story of “how China became modern” through the lens of military academies, a Western-style educational model adopted by the imperial state in the late nineteenth century that fundamentally transformed state-organized violence in China throughout the next century and to today. From the first military academy foun...
In the summer of 1930, the Central Committee of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party, reorganized the academic structure at its party school, the Central Political Institute. After the KMT completed its Northern Expedition in late 1928, unifying China and establishing its Nationalist regime in Nanjing, the party school switched its f...
