Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (November 19 - December 16)： 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (November 5 - November 24)：

Zhang’s research focuses on how peace, economic development, and foreign policy cooperation are the interlinked components of China’s modern diplomacy.  In response to multi-polarization and economic globalization, the Chinese government advocates using cooperation to achieve peace and development, which rests on the principles of mutual advantage and win-win benefits in order to safeguard its economic interests and energy security.  In order to do this, China has had to increase its presence in the areas surrounding it.  China’s modernization and rise as a superpower depends on securing reliable access to natural resources, as China’s need for resources is becoming more crucial in today’s geopolitical competition. The $46 billion in development support of China-Pakistan Economic corridor (CPEC) is the largest international development-focused investment effort that China has ever attempted. This intensified Sino-Pakistani engagement could be a game-changer in Asia and the rest of the world. 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (Sept 4 - Nov 29)：

Sanchez Herrera’s research project examines how ingredient combinations and recipes develop over time. His methodological approximation draws upon network analysis, digital humanities, and economic history. Sanchez Herrera’s research relies on a new dataset consisting of approximately 6000 recipes spanning 40 years. case study of his dissertation is Colombia, South America. Although this is his particular focus, Sanchez Herrera is broadly interested in how food recipes change as countries develop, particularly as they embrace globalization. China, similarly to Colombia, has seen rapid developments over the last 40 years. Sanchez Herrera is particularly interested in seeing how food consumption and food recipes have changed in China to be able to draw comparisons. Sanchez Herrera is currently writing and analyzing her data (which is stored in the cloud), and therefore can work anywhere. At NYU Shanghai, he is particularly interested in collaborating with professor Dr. Heather Lee, whom he has contacted previously, as she studies Chinese food in New York City from a historical point of view. Furthermore, Sanchez Herrera anticipates collaborating with professor Dr. Anna Greenspan who studies food consumption and its rapid changes in Shanghai.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 3 - May 2):

Lyuwenyu Zhang’s dissertation is titled Keeping Other Memories: Inside Unofficial Chinese Moving Image Archives, and during this fellowship, she will be writing and researching for one chapter focusing on the private film archive of a Shanghai collector, Liu Debao. Liu’s collection includes rarely-seen moving image materials of Chinese cinema from the 1960s and ’70s, spanning from thousands of film prints and several 8.75mm projectors to original movie posters. Drawing from disciplines like historiography and cultural studies, Zhang’s research project theorizes Liu’s archive as an important yet overlooked nexus point that functions as a site of memory-making activities that generate cultural discourses on nostalgia in contemporary China. Overall, Zhang’s dissertation seeks to dive into the afterlives of the moving image materials and questions the functions of the Chinese archives not only as vessels of storage and preservation but also as living and evolving cultural organisms that shape our understanding of past, present, and future.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (October 3 - November 18)：

Cheung’s dissertation focuses on how one might read and fairly account for representations of minority people in German and world literature. With a specific focus on three turn of the 20th century writers, Walter Benjamin, Peter Altenberg, and Rainer Maria Rilke, he will demonstrate the political and social stakes involved in literature's encounter with "the other". This touches on and is informed by larger, interdisciplinary issues in political science and social theory, since the appearance of marginal people in literature and the increasingly globalized world more broadly both challenge and shore up established conceptions of what constitutes the nation and threat, citizen and foreign, inside and outside. With each of his authors, Cheung argues that the representations of minority people can be read as a call for more transnational identifications in an era of dissolving nation states. Moreover, as an Asian-American raised in New York himself, he is especially keyed into representations of Chinese people in world literature. Especially as a means by which Europeans reflexively come to understand themselves as Europe began to encounter China during the 20th century through commodity trade and the appearance of minority people in large European cities. Cheung hopes to connect his European author's own experience of modernization with that of the China they often represent. This will mean conducting archival research at NYU's Shanghai site in order to juxtapose the past of the city with its globalized present.