Program

China Studies Program Dissertation Fellowships, 1996

Project

Belief, ritual and making modernity during the Nanjing decade

Program

CCK New Perspectives in Chinese Culture & Society, 2011

Program

Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society, 2012

Project

The Social Lives of Dead Bodies in Modern China

Location

Boston, MA

Program

ACLS Fellowship Program, 2025

Project

War Being: Lost and Found in Mid Twentieth Century China and Taiwan

Department

History

Abstract

Between the 1930s and the 1950s, civilians in China and Taiwan experienced displacement on a large scale by multiple measures: at least a quarter of the population became refugees across multiple conflicts and significant geographic distances. “War Being” analyzes the social experience of displacement and its effects on community formation, understandings of space and time, and moral reckonings with prolonged hot and cold war. State actors utilized wartime refugees for labor and state expansion. Meanwhile, the displaced themselves attempted to reconcile their dislocation by drawing on local, familial, collegial, and religious ties, as well as kinships formed by happenstance and shared experience. Caring for the distanced or lost dead became as important as ensuring the survival and security of the living in this process. “War Being” weaves together evidence from genealogies, religious texts, print media, film and theater, diaries, interviews, and local, national, and international archives to reconstruct and explain the consequences of emergency for the displaced living and the displaced dead of the mid-twentieth century.