Sydney China Visiting Fellows
2020 Sydney China Distinguished Fellows
The Sydney China Distinguished Fellows are hosted by the Department of Chinese Studies.
The Sydney China Distinguished Fellowship, established through the generous support of Hong Kong-based alumni Mr James Lee, recognises senior scholars specialising in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, culture or translation studies. Meet with the 2020 Sydney China Distinguished Fellows here.
- Professor Peter Zarrow (1 April to 29 April 2020)
- Professor Yomi Braester (6 July - 3 August 2020)
- Professor Hongyin Tao (1 September - 30 September 2020)
2020 Sydney China Fellows
The Sydney China Fellows, hosted by the China Studies Centre, are early and mid-career scholars who specialise in any field, historical or contemporary, related broadly to China or the Chinese world. Our Fellows are:
- Dr Anita Wong (18 May - 26 June 2020)
- Dr Mia (Yinxing) Liu (18 May - 29 June 2020)
- Dr Florian Schneider (1 June - 13 July 2020)
- Ms Man Zhang (20 July - 28 August 2020)
- Dr Romain Dittgen (late August - September 2020)
Meet with 2020 Sydney China Fellows
Dr Anita Wong
Dr. Anita Wong is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where she is currently Director of Clinical Education for the speech-language therapist undergraduate training program. She has practiced as a speech-language pathologist in the US and Canada, and published extensively on Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Her work has led to our understanding of the manifestations of DLD in Chinese speaking preschool children and the implications of DLD on reading development. Dr. Wong is developing a research program on grammar intervention with her doctoral students, and collaborating with colleagues at HKU, the University of Arizona and the University of Sydney, on language intervention in cultural and linguistically diverse contexts.
Fellowship period: 18 May - 26 June 2020
Dr Mia (Yinxing) Liu
Dr. Mia Yinxing Liu is assistant professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco (2018-present). Liu holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University (2013-14) and Bates College (2014-16), where she joined the faculty as assistant professor in Asian Studies (2016-18). Her first book, Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era (University of Hawaii Press, July 2019) critically explores how literati landscape aesthetics function in feature films of the Mao era. More recently, she researches photographic media and optical devices in China, especially the dynamics of inter-media practiecs in modern visual culture, which challenge the conventional boundaries of visual media, disciplines, and discursive fields.
Fellowship period: 18 May - 29 June 2020
Dr Florian Schneider
Dr. Florian Schneider (PhD, Sheffield University) is Senior University Lecturer in the Politics of Modern China at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is managing editor of the academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia, director of the Leiden Asia Centre, and the author of China’s Digital Nationalism (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018) as well as of Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series (Leiden & Boston: Brill 2013, recipient of the 2014 EastAsiaNet book prize). In 2017, he was awarded the Leiden University teaching prize for his innovative work as an educator. His research interests include questions of governance, political communication, and digital media in China, as well as international relations in the East-Asian region.
Fellowship period: 1 June - 13 July 2020
Ms Man Zhang
Man Zhang is a PhD research in Chinese modern history at the University of Freiburg and also a research fellow on the ERC-funded project “The Maoist Legacy: Party Dictatorship, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Truth.” Her research focuses on social, political, and cultural history in the People’s Republic of China. Her dissertation, “Searching and Punishing “Perpetrators” of the Cultural Revolution: Transitional Justice in the Post-Mao Era”, explores the state’s process of labeling and coping with perpetrators in the Cultural Revolution and highlights the challenge for the Chinese Communist Party to maintain its legitimacy when dealing with past injustices. Her recent publications include “From Denial to Apology: Narrative Strategies of a ‘Perpetrator’ after the Cultural Revolution”, in Victims, Perpetrators, and the Role of Law in Maoist China - A Case-Study Approach (DeGruyter, 2018).
Fellowship period: 20 July - 28 August 2020
Dr Romain Dittgen
Dr. Romain Dittgen holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow (Life in the City Research Grant) jointly hosted by the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has a longstanding interest in studying forms of Chinese capital in different African settings and is currently working on a co-authored book (with Dr. Gerald Chungu), entitled (Un)writing Chinese space – Conversations about the urban in Johannesburg and in Lusaka.
Fellowship period: late August to September 2020 (to be confirmed)
Professor Yueguo Gu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
- Fellowship period: 30 July - 25 August 2018
- Research project: Professor Gu organised a focus group on multimodal corpus-based research and sought to establish a joint research project involving CMMC-BDRC, the Institute of Linguistics, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney, with the primary objective of exploring a multimodal corpus linguistics approach to the multimodal data collected locally in the context of Australians learning Chinese.
Professor Heike Holbig (Goethe University Frankfurt)
- Fellowship period: 10 October – 7 November 2018
- Research project: Professor Holbig finalised an English-language manuscript based on her research project Sounds of Silence in Wang Xiaobo's Work: Exit, Voice and/or Loyalty?, to be published as a lengthy journal article or short book.
- Fellowship period: 22 April – 18 May 2019
- Research project: Professor Cheek worked on his twin research projects—one on the translation of academic public intellectuals in China today and a newer one on rethinking Chinese revolutionary history.
Professor Wendy Larson (University of Oregon)
- Fellowship period: 5 – 31 August 2019
- Research project: Professor Larson worked on her book manuscript, Global Good Cheer: Cultural Optimism Under Capitalism and Socialism in China and the West, which questions the dichotomies of the Cold War, showing a similar emphasis on encouraging optimism, as well as internal opposition to the dominant discourse, in China and various Western countries.
Dr Jinghong Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology)
- Fellowship period: 19 July - 30 August 2018
- Research project: Dr Zhang developed her research on transnational business and cultural exchange between China and Australia, tracing the supply chain and consumption of two important commodities, tea and wine.
Dr Dan Chen (University of Richmond)
- Fellowship period: 30 July - 10 September 2018
- Research project: Dr Chen worked on her book, Convenient Criticism: Local Media and Governance in Urbanizing China, which examines how local television news reporting in China helps advance local leaders' governance agendas by critiquing and correcting street-level bureaucrats' misbehaviour.
Dr Ying Qian (Columbia University)
- Fellowship period: 15 August - 10 October 2018
- Research project: Dr Qian worked on her book, Visionary Realities: Documentary Cinema in Revolutionary China, which studies documentary film aesthetics and epistemology in China's 20th century, and uses documentary as a prism to investigate intertwined histories of media practice, industrial modernity and revolutionary politics.
Dr David G. Atwill (Pennsylvania State University)
- Fellowship period: 18 February - 15 March 2019
- Research project: Dr Atwill completed his biography of Lin Zexu and developed his next monograph, on High Asia, tentatively titled The Ascendency of High Asia: Chinese Warlordism, Ethno-territoriality, and Inter-Asian Hegemony, 1900-1950.
Dr Corey Byrnes (Northwestern University)
- Fellowship period: 24 April – 5 June 2019
- Research project: Dr Byrnes worked on his second book project, on the relationship between environmentally conscious cultural production in China and the global rhetoric of threat that so often defines China in contemporary discourse.
Dr Hao Chen (Renmin University)
- Fellowship period: 24 June – 21 July 2019
- Research project: Dr Chen developed a chapter of his book Writing Chinese Medical History in A Global Context (1914-1948), revealing how "modern" medicine and the "modern" historiography of medicine integrated into each other historically in Republican China.