By Professor Xi Wang
Academic Job Search in East Asia for Humanities PhDs
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.
Making Temporary Positions Count
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.
Navigating the Uncertainties of Publishing History Monographs
Friday, January 9, 2026: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Madison Room (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Session Organizer: Dan Du, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Chair: Dan Du, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Presenters:
Bridget Barry, University of Nebraska Press
Dan Du, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware
Xiaowei Zheng, University of California, Santa Barbara
Session Abstract
Publishing monographs remains a task of utmost importance for most academics in the field of history, who often find this experience frustrating and emotionally taxing. It is a long process, which demands a wide variety of academic and social skills ranging from selecting the right topics and gathering primary sources as well as communicating with editors and reviewers. It is a complex procedure requiring multiple parties to collaborate, often within a short time window, to get the manuscript ready for the market. It is also a pivotal and yet stressful step in our career paths, as the accomplishments and jobs of most professional historians still largely hinge on the publication of books. Therefore, although the consequence is mostly rewarding, this long journey to monograph publications is challenging for all involved. By convening authors, editors, and reviewers, this roundtable aims to facilitate open discussions among all stakeholders and generate critical reflections on their strategies and failures in tackling shared challenges, thus seeking to find better solutions for the publication process or, at the very least, helping others navigate it. As the largest meeting for historians, the AHA is the ideal platform for opening the conversation and receiving constructive feedback from the audience.
The four panelists will discuss the publication process from different perspectives. As the first-time author, Dan Du will recount her experience with publishing her monograph when the tenure clock was ticking. Owing to time constraints, the tasks of communicating with editors, balancing reviewers’ varied evaluations, and finalizing the manuscript became especially daunting. The key was being flexible, communicative, and willing to incorporate varying ideas into the revision process. The road to the second book has never been shorter or easier, as Yuanchong Wang will emphasize in his presentation. With more expertise in the field, the endeavor to select research topics for the second project, find archival sources, and tackle reviewers’ feedback can be far more solitary than publishing the first book, not to mention the increasingly significant familial responsibilities. Wang will share his strategies of crafting a clear plan for the second monograph as early as the dissertation revision stage. Editors have different perspectives and tips. Bridget Barry, drawing on her over a decade of experience as editor-in-chief at the University of Nebraska Press, will offer authors the strategies to navigate the hurdles, such as choosing publishers, writing proposals, managing peer reviews, finalizing manuscripts, writing second books, and promoting their books. Peer reviewers are another gatekeeper in book publications and thus, sometimes, have uneasy relations with authors. However, Xiaowei Zheng will demystify this role in her presentation, clarifying reviewers’ expectations in their reports and providing practical tips for graduate students and assistant professors on responding to readers’ reports.
Fluidity and Integration of Property Rights in State Building
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Marshfield Room (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Session Organizer: Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Chair: Brian James DeMare, Tulane University
Papers:
Measuring the Land for Our Nation: Land Ownership, Agricultural Migration, and Nationality Policy in Manchurian Borderland, 1912–44
Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“Each Person Has One Name Only”: State Regulation of Personal Names in Republican China, 1936–49
Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Luxury, Privilege, and Legitimacy: Consumption of Imported Goods from the Capitalist World in Maoist China’s Friendship Stores, 1958–78
Zhen Zhang, University of Edinburgh
Animals, Products, and State Building: China’s Sheep Improvement Project and Wool Trade in the Early 20th Century
Guanran Cui, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Comment: Brian James DeMare, Tulane University
Session Abstract:
Private property and its regulation are intricately interwoven with the process of state building in 20th-century Chinese history. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty as the threshold between “state of exception” and “legal order” that blurs the two into a “zone of indistinction”, this panel proposes to situate state building between the fluidity of ideas, commodities, peoples, and the integration of rights, classes, and nation for reexamination. Through the lenses of modern Chinese governments’ private property management and corresponding legislation agendas, this dialectical dynamic of state building and the development of right reveals itself most manifestly. The history of the modern Chinese state is a collaborative structure centered on the idea of rights, and our panel gathers four studies focusing on different aspects of property rights in modern Chinese society across the twentieth century to support this argument. Guanran Cui’s paper captures sheep and wool as biological resources that were incorporated into China’s modernization agenda and wartime economy in the early twentieth century. Xiaoyan Ren’s paper explores the standardization and regulation of personal name usage through ROC’s legislation from 1936 to 1949. It argues that the primary motivation for restricting individuals to a single official name stemmed from the need to regulate economic activities and, specifically, to implement a modern income-based taxation system. Luming Xu’s paper focuses on the transformation of land policy and migration management in Manchuria from 1912 to 1945, examining its relationship with the ROC’s, Japan’s, and Manchukuo’s nationality policies, through the lens of the coloniality of the nation. Zhen Zhang’s paper investigates the state’s operations of the privileged economy in the early PRC era. It takes the Friendship Store system where the privileged few accesses imported luxury goods as a representative case. By situating these practices within broader debates on property rights and privilege, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the contradictions inherent in Maoist China’s socio-economic policies. Juxtaposed together, this panel reveals that civil rights, a concept that originated from ideas of private property, and state building are co-constituted and mutually irreducible from each other. In modern states, when every individual is supposed to be a citizen of the state, they receive individual liberties that are represented by rights but at the same time permanently confined within the sphere of sovereign power.
Paper Abstracts:
Measuring the Land for Our Nation: Land Ownership, Agricultural Migration, and Nationality Policy in Manchurian Borderland, 1912-1944
Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: This study focuses on China’s and Japan’s land measurement projects (Ch. tudi qingzhang, 土地清丈, Jp. chiseki seiri, 地籍整理) in early 20-century Manchuria, historically a borderland region between China and the Japanese empire, and argues that these projects were efforts of transforming the “underdeveloped frontier” into “fixed borderland”. Through the lenses of global capitalist competitions and international legal framework, land has become both the capital of nations and an integral part of “rights” and “citizenship”, both Chinese and Japanese authorities in Manchuria were fixated on the issues of land ownership (Ch. tudi suoyou quan, 土地所有權, Jp. tochi shōso ken, 土地商租権) and nationalities (Ch. guoji, Jp. kokuseki, 国籍) throughout the history of their competitions in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, these projects were intimately intertwined with the nation building processes of both China and Japan during that time, which formed a homogenization structure for the people, especially for the indigenous people of Manchuria and Korean migrants who could not fit into either Chinese or Japanese nation seamlessly.
“Each Person Has One Name Only”: State Regulation of Personal Names in Republican China, 1936-1949
Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
This paper explores the Nationalist state’s regulation of personal names in Republican China, focusing on the transition from the customary practice of one individual having multiple names to the legal requirement of a single name per individual. Central to this study is the Regulations on the Restriction of Name Usage (姓名使用限制条例), a pivotal legal code implemented by the Nationalist government to standardize naming practice. This paper traces the trajectory of this regulation, from its initial proposal in 1936 and subsequent rejection in June 1937 to its formal enactment in 1941 and amendment in 1948. I argue that the primary impetus for enforcing name standardization originated from the financial sector, as the modernization of the capitalist market and taxation systems necessitated stable, individualized identification. By examining the history of name restriction in Republican China, this paper offers a novel perspective on the development of capitalism in China, particularly the transformation of the fundamental unit of private property from households and lineage to individual citizens.
Luxury, Privilege, and Legitimacy: Consumption of Imported Goods from the Capitalist World in Maoist China’s Friendship Stores, 1958-1978
Zhen Zhang, University of Edinburgh
This presentation concentrates on the ideological and legal complexities relevant to the consumption of imported luxury goods in Maoist China. It analyzes the role and function of Friendship Stores as exclusive spaces of privilege. In a Maoist socialist society that officially repudiated private property and commodification, all goods distributed under the state-run supply system were deemed collective labor products. Individuals possessed only usage and consumption rights, devoid of ownership. Yet, Friendship Stores allowed elite consumers holding foreign exchange vouchers to purchase restricted items from capitalist countries, challenging the regime’s commitment to egalitarianism and communist morality. In this context, this presentation discusses how the Chinese Communist Party justified such practices within its ideological framework and legal discourse, and how ordinary citizens reconciled these visible inequalities with the state’s narrative of socialist equality. By situating these practices within broader debates on property rights and privilege, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the contradictions inherent in Maoist China’s socio-economic policies.
Animals, Products, and State Building: China’s Sheep Improvement Project and Wool Trade in the Early 20th Century
Guanran Cui, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Abstract: This study demonstrates how sheep and wool were incorporated as biological resources into Chinese state-building from the late 1910s through the 1940s in North and Northwest China.
Beginning with local attempts on improving China’s sheep breeds and wool production, pre-WWII rhetoric and policy responding to deterioration of economy engendered both provincial and private corporations to specialize and “modernize” sheep husbandry. Traditional individual husbandry adapting to social and environmental heterogeneity was considered backward and needed to be replaced by new high-productive breeds and standardized management. The transnational agricultural network and nationwide discourse of productive enterprises facilitated the replacement and official corporations’ gradual expansion in sheep and wool trade. The Second Sino-Japanese War terminated the multi-actor dynamics and stimulated the national investment in husbandry in free northwestern provinces and bloom of Chinese dirigisme on wool trade, which was a strategic deployment to compete with Japanese puppet dirigisme on Inner Mongolian wool and secure resources aiding the war. This study shows how state building works as a complex of economic and biological powers and in a broader context complicates the understanding of interaction between state and property.