Professor Shuang WEN is a historian of modern China and the Arab world. Her research and teaching explore modern East Asian and Middle Eastern histories in global and transregional contexts, Islam and Muslims in China, Chinese-Arab relations, and history of medicine, illness, and care.
Her first-book manuscript, Invisible Entanglements: Chinese-Arab Connections in the Age of Global Empires(under review), examines connections between Chinese and Arab societies from the late nineteenth century through World War II. Drawing on Chinese- and Arabic-language sources and research conducted across China, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, the project asks how seemingly distant worlds became connected through global imperial networks. Wen’s next project turns to the history of medicine, oral history, and the experiences of Chinese Muslim communities. It investigates breast cancer among women in China, including Chinese Muslim women, examining the intersections of biomedical treatment, traditional medicine, religion, gender, work, family, and caregiving. This project builds on oral-history research with breast cancer survivors and caregivers in Shanghai and the United Arab Emirates and contributes to the emerging global history of cancer by bringing Chinese and Muslim experiences into a literature still largely centered on Europe and North America.
Wen's research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Association for Asian Studies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Qatar Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her work has also been featured by the American Historical Association in Perspectives on History. She serves as Book Review Editor for The Chinese Historical Review.
Prof. Wen is an innovative educator with a particular commitment to helping students understand connections across conventional geographic and disciplinary boundaries. Experiential learning is central to her teaching. Students encounter history through oral-history interviews, community-based research, food and material culture, field visits, simulations, and digital technologies. At NYU Shanghai, she created and mentors the Oral History Summer Apprenticeship, through which students document and preserve the experiences of people in their communities. Her experiential-learning module on Middle Eastern food history was featured by the NYU Shanghai Gazette. She is also a recipient of the New York University Teaching Advancement Grant (AY 25-27) for her pedagogical innovation of “Bringing Middle Eastern History to Life in Shanghai: Enhancing Student Engagement and Learning Experience with VR Simulation Technology” and a two-time finalist of NYU Shanghai Teaching Excellence Award for AY 23-24 and AY 25-26.
Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, Prof. Wen held fellowships at the National University of Singapore and New York University Abu Dhabi. As a native Mandarin speaker, she received intensive Arabic-language training from Egypt, Syria, and the US.
Before becoming a historian, Wen worked as a broadcast journalist and simultaneous interpreter for Phoenix Satellite Television InfoNews Channel in Hong Kong, covering major news events in the Middle East. Her earlier career as a journalist and interpreter continues to inform her interest in multilingual research, oral history, cross-cultural communication, and histories that cross conventional regional boundaries.
Select Publications
- “Between Worlds: Identity, Survival, and Epistemic Making in Modernities of the Global South (1860–1933),” The Chinese Historical Review 32, no. 2 (November 2025): 173-197. https://doi.org/10.1080/1547402X.2025.2600839
- "Overcoming Fractures of Cross-Cultural Understanding: Modern Chinese Knowledge Production on the Arab World,” Global Perspectives (May 2024), Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2024.117326.
- “A Short History of Modern Arab Knowledge Production on China,” in Islam, Revival, and Reform: Redefining Tradition for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Natana J. DeLong-Bas, University of Syracuse Press, 2022, chapter 9.
- “From Manchuria to Egypt: Soybean’s Global Migration and Transformation in the Twentieth Century,” Asian Journal ofMiddle Eastern and Islamic Studies 13 (June 2019): 176-194.
- “The Characters of Egypt Reflected by Chinese Arabist Xue Qingguo” (“as-Shakhṣiyyah al-Miṣriyyah fi mir’āh mustaʿarab Ṣini biqalami Bassam Xue Qingguo” الشخصية المصرية في مرآة مستعرب صيني بقلم بسام شوي تشينغ قوه), in special issue on China-Egypt relations, Egyptian Gazette, May 14, 2015, Cairo, Egypt
Education
- PhD, Transregional History (modern Middle East and East Asia)
Georgetown University, USA - MA, Middle East Studies and Arabic
American University in Cairo, Egypt - MA, English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation and Translation
Beijing Foreign Studies University, China - BA, English Language, Literature, and Culture
University of International Relations, China
- Chinese-Arab Social and Cultural Interactions
- Modern Chinese History in the Global Context
- Modern Arab History in the Global Context
- GCHN-SHU110 The Concept of China
- GCHN-SHU165 China and the Islamic World
- HIST-SHU103 Oral History: Method and Practice
- HIST-SHU130 Arab-Islamic Influence on the West
- HIST-SHU265 The Emergence of the Modern Middle East and North Africa
- HIST-SHU312 China Encounters the World
- Faculty mentor: Oral History Summer Apprenticeship