Current NYU Shanghai Graduate Dissertation Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 3 - May 22):

Chester‘s dissertation project incorporates quantitative text analysis of Chinese media where he finds evidence that coverage of foreign countries differs across media institutions according to the regime type of the country being covered. However, he cannot say with any certainty what mechanisms drive this pattern without speaking with the people who produce news in China: journalists. Is foreign coverage mediated by journalists’ preferences and beliefs? If so, what journalist backgrounds and incentives are likely to mediate the tone of foreign news coverage? To better understand these mechanisms, he intends to perform interviews with journalists in China to gain a qualitative understanding of what factors influence their reporting behavior.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 13 - December 17):

Tianyuan's dissertation, “The Yellow Nude: Inventing Asian Classicism in Republican China,” examines the spread of the nude motif, a Western import that had no existence as an idea or a practice in dynastic China, and the country’s subsequent efforts to adopt and sinify it in its arts from late nineteenth century to early twentieth century. Despite its art historical focus, the project has wider aims. It has been amply noted that, unlike the Greco-Roman tradition, there were no nudes in the Chinese artistic imagination. Its introduction from the West therefore presents several unprecedented challenges that lie outside the field of art: how to understand a body that exists outside of social articulations, how to exercise the newly imported idea of an optical eye to observe human anatomy, and how to construct a new indigenous canon that seeks to enter world culture by adopting its “universal” motif while maintaining the country’s “difference.” Specifically, can we speak of an art of the modern age in a framework that does not depend on an implicit bifurcation between the “universal”—a birthmark term that comes with the idea of modernity—and the “different” (i.e., this is what is Chinese, or Japanese, about this art).

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 3 - May 22):

Liu's research focuses on those who fall under the under the radar of society and research: mixed-status Chinese families in the US. Mainstream literature finds that Chinese immigrants not only have higher median household incomes compared to all other foreign-born pan-ethnic groups, but they also have much higher levels of educational attainment compared to other groups in the US. Chinese immigrants are known to be part of the model minority narrative, where they have specific cultural traits that help this group to be successful in career and academics. Chinese immigrants might come in various different pathways, but their emphasis on education has allowed many of their next generation to achieve upward mobility. Many have reasoned the educational success to be due to effort, hyper-selectivity, and ethnic capital. Drawing upon four years of ethnographic fieldwork in New York, Liu examines the lived experiences of mixed-status Chinese families, to ultimately show what drives their decision-making processes and perspectives is the desire to give back face to their families. Having experienced educational exclusion and low returns, these Chinese families have replaced education with low-status work abroad. As this immigrant group’s cultural frames are faced with new exclusion and barriers that come from having temporary legal status, they experience downward mobility and continuous disadvantage in the US. Liu will be using her time at NYU Shanghai to focus on dissertation analysis and writing.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 2 - December 15) :

Lee’s dissertation is about causality—causes and their effects. He wants to know what it is for one thing to cause another. Why? Because causality permeates our understanding of just about everything. To predict whether a certain event will occur, we look to see whether anything that might cause it to occur is currently in place. To explain why things happened the way they did, we appeal to the factors that caused the course of events we observed. When formulating effective strategies to achieve our ends, we take note of the causal structure of the world and decide where in the network of causal relationships would be most prudent to intervene so as to best realise our goals. And when apportioning moral responsibility for outcomes, we look to what, and who, was causally responsible for what happened. Causality is at the very centre of the human conceptual scheme. Lee argues that we can shed light on our conceptual landscape by attending to a duality at the heart of causality: some causal relationships are fundamental, whiles others are derivative. After working to establish this fundamental-derivative split, Lee offers a bipartite theory of causality consonant with its duality, and uses it to resolve a number of outstanding philosophical puzzles. He will use his time in Shanghai to work closely with Brad Weslake, a leading metaphysician and philosopher of science who has made a number of critical contributions to our understanding of causality.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 2 - December 15) :

Producing a second language (L2) without accent is challenging for late L2 learners, because speech motor control underlying pronunciation could have been greatly affected by physical changes at an early age. However, individual differences in L2 speech production performance have been reported in many studies. Li’s project aims to investigate the mechanisms underlying such individual variation. There are three specific research questions: 1) What is the effect of individual differences in auditory and somatosensory acuity in L2 speech production? 2) Can L2 learners establish distinct and long-term feedforward control for L2 speech sounds? 3) Does the establishment of feedforward control for L2 speech sounds have neural basis? The experiment to be conducted at NYU Shanghai aims to answer the third research question. Mandarin native speakers who are late learners of a foreign language will be recruited. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used to track brain activity in regions associated with speech feedforward and feedback control. Analysis will be conducted to examine if highly successful L2 learners will demonstrate decreased brain activity associated with feedback control (increased feedforward control) as compared to less successful learners. Individual differences in sensory acuity will also be studied. Investigation into the motor-sensory aspects in L2 production through behavioral and neural measures will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of bilingualism.