Sarah Basham
Sarah Basham is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. She completed her BA and MA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, and is back in Philadelphia this year as a dissertation writing fellow with the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Her research interests include the history of science, technology, and medicine in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. She is particularly interested in changing epistemological assumptions in this period and the intersection between the history of science and the history of the book. Her dissertation examines Mao Yuanyi’s 茅元儀 (1594–1640) Treatise on Military Preparedness (Wu bei zhi 武備志, 1621) as a case study of Ming practices of technical knowledge production and strives to account for the Treatise’s status as an object produced by both material and non-material intellectual practices.
Chen Huiying
Chen Huiying is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Under the direction of Professor Laura Hostetler, she studies the history of travel in eighteenth-century China by focusing on a series of commercial travel guides. She is interested in the textual production of travel itineraries and every day experience of travel in the eighteenth century.
Chen Kaijun
Kaijun Chen is an Assistant Professor teaching literature and cultural history of Late Imperial China in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University. Kaijun Chen received his PhD degree at Columbia University for his work on the history of ceramics in 2014. He is specialized in the history of imperial institutions, technology, and material culture. His dissertation, Making the Empire: Porcelain Supervisor Tang Ying (1682–1756) and the Rise of Technocratic Culture, examines the institutionalization of expert officials, who took a hands-on approach to technological knowledge. His other publications investigate the circulation of connoisseurial and mercantile knowledge from Song to Qing dynasty.
Chen Yanrong
Chen Yanrong 陈妍蓉, is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Sinology at KU Leuven in Belgium. Her dissertation is about Chinese reception of Bible in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. She is interested in contacts between the East and the West, European and Chinese book histories, the modern history of China, East Asian religions, and Digital Humanities. Besides academic research, she also teach advanced Chinese language and literature at university and translate academic works, plays, and screenplays.
Timothy Clifford
Tim Clifford is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is currently completing his dissertation, titled “In the Eye of the Selector: Ancient-Style Prose Anthologies in Ming Dynasty China.” His research interests include Chinese literature of the 15th-19th centuries, textual transmission and literature as social practice, the history of books and printing across East Asia, and the digital humanities.
Li Renyuan
Li Ren-Yuan is an assistant research fellow in the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan He published 晚清的新式傳播媒體與知識份子：以報刊出版為中心的討論 (New media and intellectuals during the late Qing: A study on periodicals and publishing business) in 2005, and received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 2014, with the dissertation titled “Making Texts in Chinese Villages: Textual Production in Rural China During the Ming-Qing Period.” He is interested in book history, social and cultural history in late imperial China.
Zhenzhen Lu
Zhenzhen Lu received her BA in Anthropology and East Asian Studies from Harvard University and her MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “The Vernacular World of Pu Songling” (University of Pennsylvania, 2017), studies a diverse group of vernacular writings attributed to Pu Songling (1640-1715) in the context of local book culture in Pu’s native Shandong. Along with the broad field of Chinese vernacular literature, Zhenzhen is interested in the interfaces between manuscript and print culture in late imperial China, and in early 20 th century literary scholarship and book collecting in East Asia. In an ideal world, her personal bookshelf would consist of comics and cookbooks.
Sarah Primmer
Sarah Primmer is a doctoral student in East Asian Studies at Harvard University.
Wang Wei
Wang Wei王蔚 is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. She started my Ph.D. study in 2011, and is now working on my her issertation prospectus. She is interesting in late imperial Chinese literature, especially Chinese fiction, drama, women’s literature, print and material culture. Her dissertation project concerns the illustrated fictions during the Ming-Qing transition. She is studying under the advice of Professor Robert Hegel and Professor Beata Grant. In her spare time she enjoys exploring good restaurants and coffee shops with friends, listening to music, dancing, and traveling.
Bingyu Zheng
Bingyu Zheng is a Ph.d. candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University, whose research focuses onethnicity, regional identities, and urban culture in early modern China. He is currently completing his dissertation on the leisure and daily life of bannermen in Beijing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.