Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (May 27 - June 14) :

Professor McCarron is working on a book project that examines connections between Ireland and China; and relations between Irish and Chinese in the United States, the British Empire, and the broader Pacific world. Three of his chapters focus on the many Irish who served in China on behalf of the United States and the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is planning on consulting primary sources at libraries and archives in Shanghai related to this project. Furthermore, Professor McCarron hopes to collaborate with scholars in Shanghai who share similar research interests as him (this includes both NYU Shanghai scholars and Fudan University scholars).

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 1 - July 26) :

Large cities around the world are facing an unprecedented housing crisis; approximately 1.6 billion people are inadequately housed, while one hundred million are homeless and sixty million are forcibly displaced from their homes. Professor Wong’s research is interdisciplinary and underscores the intimacies of home in shaping political possibilities and diasporic intimacies. Building on her current research-- which examines the political impacts of gentrification in Chinatowns across the United States-- this project expands the scope of her scholarship to investigate how residents in Shanghai, China are responding to forced evictions and uprootedness. Drawing from ethnographic research, archival materials, and oral history interviews with residents across three generations in Shanghai, this project will provide a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which residents are active in the making of urban space and urban politics. This project will focus on three specific neighborhoods in Shanghai, including Xintiandi, Laoximen, and Luowan – a place where her own family was displaced thirty years ago. Given that encounters with forced eviction and displacement has come to increasingly shape the lives of residents in the rapidly changing city, Professor Wong’s research will provide a useful lens to learn about how those who have limited resources and access to formal institutions have fought to stay in their homes. Professor Wong’s primary goals for the project are to preserve place-based knowledge as told by former residents themselves, document strategies of resistance to displacement from past to present, and interrogate the sociocultural boundaries of the urban Chinese diaspora. This project will not only draw critical connections between the displacement occurring in American Chinatowns to the neighborhood changes in Shanghai, it will also result in an open access, web-based digital public history project which would involve the digitization, visualization, and dissemination of the materials collected over the summer. As neighborhoods in large cities like Shanghai continue to disappear due to modernization, and residents are uprooted from their homes, it is important that these individual and collective narratives also at risk of being displaced are well preserved for future generations. 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 2 - July 25) :

For Professor Xie’s next book project, she will be conducting research on female avant-gardism in contemporary Chinese poetry. In particular, she will focus on the work of post-1979 female poets from mainland China, along with those who position themselves against a Chinese feminine lyric tradition largely constructed through a patriarchal perspective. Professor Xie looks forward to meeting the local literary community in Shanghai, and to acquiring volumes of contemporary Chinese poetry that have not yet been translated into English or published through U.S. presses, with an eye toward future translation projects.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (June 24 - July 26) :

Yujing Chen’s research project will be carried out as an exploration of how China’s economic, political and urban transformations informed the subjects of Chinese cinema; and how this filmography in turn documented and interpreted the transformation of China’s cultural identity. A rising world super power, China—a historically agricultural civilization—has started to identify primarily with the city. Shanghai was not only China’s first modernized city, but also the pioneer of Chinese cinematic practice. Though Shanghai’s prosperity has long been criticized as a residual of Western imperialism and culture appropriation, Chen believes that the city’s cultural identity, especially in its cinematic representation, is an organic fusion of the indigenous and the foreign which continues to inform and influence China’s modern identity at large. In his research, he hopes to trace Shanghai’s history along side the evolution of Chinese cinema. Considering those themes side by side, he will attempt to map a genealogy of Chinese cultural identity and try to induce what its current representation in cinema should be in this globalized world.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (June 16 - July 7) :

William Godel researches comparative politics, social media, and methods in political science. He has extensive experience in China and speaking Chinese (3.5 years) and is interested in researching Chinese social media use. In particular, how Chinese social media and internet culture differs-- or is similar to-- Western paradigms. His dissertation also researches state formation, and he would like to research China's historical experience in state formation and identify it with contemporary Chinese administrative capacity.