I am writing a book that explores displacement, home, and community formation during China and Taiwan's mid-twentieth-century "long war" -- the Japan, civil and Cold wars, 1937-1959. This research has deepened my interest in comparing migrations, diasporas and territorial partitionings, and in employing ritual and local studies as methods in these fields.  War Being aims to build an empirical and theoretical foundation explaining one of the most significant yet poorly-understood subjects of the twentieth century: the repeated, often traumatic and socially significant displacement of persons across China and over the Taiwan strait from the time of Japan's invasion in 1937, through its surrender and the subsequent Chinese civil war, and continuing through the 1950s and beyond. It considers the Japan, civil and early Cold War periods as a “long war” in terms of the experience of many displaced persons, a continuity which the combined analysis of China and Taiwan brings to light. It also argues that these cases are important to the global histories of wartime and postwar partition and displacement and Chinese migration and diaspora.  This project draws upon archives, memoir, fiction, periodicals, oral histories, fieldwork, genealogies, and journalistic accounts to paint a cultural and social history of concrete and conceptual home-building amid disruption. It explores the question of how people physically and mentally adapt to the places where war brings them, and how such movement of populations – living and dead -- shapes community space and everydayness -- including, importantly, the lives of the original residents of the transformed areas, and those who did not depart. Geographically traveling between eastern and southwestern China, offshore islands, and urban and rural Taiwan, the book addresses how displaced persons and their various support networks might build community during a time when the “refugee” became an increasingly mediated commodity on the national and international levels. The claims of the displaced for integrity and sovereignty on their behalf and on behalf of their dead resonate strongly with the social and political dynamics of our present world.

• Cogut Institute Humanities Initiative Grant, 2020-21, “Chinese Studies in the Age of Covid-19: Urgent work in the Humanities”
• China Initiative Grant, 2020-21, “Chinese Studies in the Age of Covid-19: Urgent work in the Humanities”
• Research Fellowship in Global History, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (April-May 2020, postponed)
• Brown Data Science Grant, Workshop on Assessing and Planning the Uses of Digital Tools, 2019.
• Brown University Research Seed Award, “The Field of the Chinese State: An ‘Archive to Article’ Project” 2018. With Maura Dykstra, Caltech and Ian J. Miller, St. John’s University.
• China Initiative Collaboration Grant, Watson Institute, Brown University, 2015-16. With Maura Dykstra, UCLA.
• Faculty Fellow, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University, Spring 2018
• Fellow, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, 2014-15
• Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society Conference Grant, 2012, and Planning Meeting Grant, 2011, American Council of Learned Societies and Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation.
• Research Grant for Foreign Scholars in Chinese Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, National Library, Taiwan, September-December 2010.
• An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, 2004-05.

"Finding Nature in Religion, Hunting Religion from the Environment", in Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China, ed. by James Miller, Dan Smyer Yu, Peter van der Veer, Routledge, 2014.

"City of Life and Death ('Nanjing! Nanjing!') and the Silenced Nanjing Native", in Through a Lens Darkly: Films of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, ed. by John J. Michalczyk and Raymond G. Helmick, Peter Lang, 2013.

"The Transformation of the Concept of Religion in Chinese Modernity", in Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought, edited by Joachim Gentz and Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Palgrave McMillan, 2013.

从宗教中发现自然，从环境里搜照宗教 Cong zongjiao zhong faxian ziran, cong huanjing li souzhao zongjiao [Finding Nature in Religion, Hunting Religion from the Environment], trans. by Fan Meng, in 中国宗教多元与生态可持续性发展研究 Zhongguo zongjiao duoyuan yu shengtai ke chixu xing fazhan yanjiu [Religious Diversity and Ecological Sustainability in China], ed. by Su Faxiang 苏发祥 and Dan Smyer Yu 郁丹, Academy Press, 2013.

Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.)

"Two Tombs: Thoughts on Zhu Yuanzhang, the Kuomintang, and the Meanings of National Heroes", in Sarah K. Schneewind, ed. Long Live the Emperor! The Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History (Minneapolis: Ming Studies, 2008), 355-390.

"Ritual Competition and the Modernizing Nation-State", in Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 87-112.

"Civic Faith and Hybrid Ritual in Nationalist China", in Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart, ed., Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 27-56.

"'Begging the Sages of the Party-State': Citizenship and Government in Transition in Nationalist China, 1927-1937',with Liang Hong-ming, International Review of Social History, 2001 Supplement (also published as Lex Heerma van Voss, ed., Petitions in Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),) 183-207.

• Short list, Humanities, International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize 2011 (biannual) for Superstitious Regimes .

 

Association for Asian Studies
American Historical Association
Historical Society for Twentieth Century China
Society for the Study of Chinese Religions
Co-organizer and 2026-28 Convener, Brown Legal History Workshop 
Organizer, Modern Asian History Working Group

I teach undergraduate courses in modern Chinese history, the social history of Chinese popular culture, modern East Asia, borderlands history, and comparative topics on historical memory, transitional justice, and the social history of death. At the graduate level I have taught thematic courses on ritual as well as colloquia in the history of modern China and the history of East Asia, and in the department's series of professional development seminars. I also direct an informal research group in modern Asian history for grad students, postdocs, and faculty. I welcome contact from graduate students working in the history of modern China and Taiwan or East Asia, or in any geographic area with an interest in space and place; the modern state; displacement and migration; the social and cultural history of war, conflict and mass violence; death, death ritual, and the body; ritual studies; or the interplay between secularism, religion, and modernity.