Chinese Historians

Though the academic job market in humanities continues to be highly competitive, East Asian universities offer exciting opportunities for scholarly development and diverse academic pathways. We invite you to join an online discussion with three early-career scholars with experience in academic positions across East Asia, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. Drawing from their experiences, our speakers will share insights on key aspects of academic career development in East Asia, including job application procedures and strategies, adapting to East Asian university systems, and building professional networks in different East Asian cities. This workshop aims to provide practical guidance for those interested in pursuing academic careers in East Asia. 

Sincerely,

Dr. Yi Ren

Our speakers:

Dr. Lin Du will join as an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore in July this year. She completed her PhD at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Lin holds an MA from the Regional Studies East Asia Program at Harvard University and a BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Peking University. Her pioneering work in machine learning has been published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), and her contributions to humanities research are forthcoming in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Asia Pacific Perspectives.

Dr. Zifeng Liu is an Assistant Professor of History in the Academy of Chinese, History, Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his PhD in Africana Studies from Cornell University and spent two years in the African Research Center at the Pennsylvania State University as a postdoctoral scholar. He is an intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current book project traces a history of African and African diaspora women radicals’ engagements with China in the age of Bandung.

Dr. Yu Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto in 2019. Starting in 2020, he had worked at the University of Macau first as a post-doctoral fellow and then as a research assistant professor before moving to Cornell. His current book project, All Ears: Listening to Radio in China, 1940–1976, explores the dynamics of technopolitics in the Mao era, namely how loudspeakers changed the structure of information flow, the making of socialist subjects, urban and rural landscapes, and the formation of political culture in the early PRC period. 

Speakers: Dr. Zachary Hershey, Dr. Ignatius G.D Suglo, Dr. Hong Zhang

Moderator: Dr. Yi Ren

When: June 10, 2025, 19:00-21:00 PM EST

Where: Zoom, please register in advance at https://ualr-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/vATvmdp2RSeuLzVzfOreDA

Dear Colleagues,

In today’s challenging academic job market, early-career scholars often move through a series of temporary positions before securing tenure-track roles. During these temporary academic appointments, how should we develop research and plan publications, diversify our teaching portfolios and grow pedagogically, build professional networks and seek mentorship opportunities, and maintain work-life balance? In the upcoming CHUS Engagement online workshop, we are inviting three academics who have effectively leveraged postdoctoral fellowships and visiting assistant professorships as stepping stones to tenure-track appointments. They will offer first-hand experiences and actionable advice for turning these interim roles into meaningful career advancement opportunities.

Sincerely,

Yi Ren

Our speakers:

Dr. Zachary Hersey will join the Department of History at William & Mary as an Assistant Professor this fall, where he currently serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He is an environmental and legal historian of middle-period (c. 800-1300) East and Inner Asia with a focus on the intersection of agricultural and pastoral activities in North China. He is now working on a book project on the environmental and ethnic dynamics of Liao-era North China. Before joining William & Mary, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kenyon College from 2022 to 2024. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Dr. Ignatius G.D. Suglo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at University of Richmond. He is a media and cultural historian and a scholar of global media whose research interests straddle two sets of intersecting fields. The first puts media and communication studies in conversation with Afro-Asian studies. This strand of research engages with the African presence in Chinese media from the 19th century to the present and their role in knowledge production, circulation, and worldmaking. The second is at the intersection of media histories and critical digital media. This strand of research examines histories of digital media and how older and newer forms of media coexist in hybrid media ecologies in multiple contexts including social movements and archiving practices. Prior to joining the University of Richmond, Ignatius was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2022. His writing has appeared in leading journals including Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Asian and African Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Dr. Hong Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington. Her research focuses on China’s role in global development, with an emphasis on infrastructure and industrialization. She examines how China’s development trajectory, domestic institutions, and structural position in the global economy shape its international development engagements, and how China may be reshaping global development governance. Before joining IU, she was a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in 2022-24. Prior to that, she held concurrent Postdoctoral Fellowships at the China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins University-School of Advanced International Studies, and at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program in 2021-22. She received a PhD from George Mason University in 2021.