Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Self-immolation is new to Tibet historically, religiously and politically, and since the first immolation in 2009, these horrific spectacles have captured worldwide attention with daunting images of living human beings setting themselves on fire, splashed around newspapers, magazines, TV and online space. Liu’s paper will examine the cultural, historical and political reasons behind the representation of these acts that are frequently covered by the western media and shared with the world audiences as a media spectacle. She is particularly fascinated by the stark contrast of media reports from the West and the Chinese State media. By comparing the two, Liu hopes to analyze the ideologies behind the two representations. By unpacking the media coverage by both the Western and the Chinese State media, she argues that dominant Western media have reproduced the spectacle of self-immolation in Tibet and controlled the narrative around it as well. Liu believes this has fostered an unbalanced and hegemonic discourse around the Tibetan self-immolation.

Professor Haidt is currently working on his latest book, “The Moral Psychology of Capitalism”. He is re-orienting his research to study the moral foundations of business and capitalism. America is a mature capitalist democracy that has been stuck in a bitter partisan debate over many economic questions for decades. We need fresh ideas, and a fresh perspective on capitalism. During Professor Haidt’s sabbatical, he will take a 3 month research trip across Asia, beginning in NYU Abu Dhabi, and visiting Singapore, China, Korea, and Japan. In Shanghai, Professor Haidt will interview business leaders, academics, government officials, small business owners, factory workers, and other citizens. He will try to reconstruct the multiple “moral matrices” — or networks of moral meanings — that exist in each country, with regard to capitalism and business. 

Wang’s dissertation project lies broadly in the fields of supply chain management and optimization. In particular, she will work on process flexibility. Wang tries to investigate the performance of a specific sparse production system configuration relative to the best performance achievable by full flexibility. She will analyze this problem from a distributionally robust optimization perspective - i.e., to quantity the effectiveness of the sparse structure relative to full flexibility without assuming the specific distribution of the product demand. Instead, the only information available is the mean and variance of the random demand, and Wang provides a performance guarantee for the sparse structure against the worst-case scenario.

Lessowitz will be researching first person accounts of the Great Chinese Famine which occurred in the Chinese provinces from 1959 - 1953. Over 40 million Chinese Farmers died of starvation and during this time, China was exporting much of its grain, and there was no food shortage. Lessowitz hopes to assemble hundreds of audio and visual stories from survivors to create a data base of testimony. She will use this testimony to give voice to those who suffered, and bring light to this under documented genocide. In addition to the video records, Lessowitz hopes to use this research to inform a narrative feature script she has already written and would like to revise for historical and cultural accuracy. Lessowitz believes in the importance of exploring this historical event and discovering it fully before all of its witnesses are no more.