Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (May 27 - June 20) :

“Shanghai maps of light + shadow” will be an interactive city walk, created from photo-based digital ‘paintings’ and historic imagery mapped to Shanghai streets. It is a convergence of Professor Feist’s current mapping project on refugees in Greece, “the light and shadow” paintings series, and her own German heritage. She will trace her steps from modern Shanghai to the former Jewish quarter. Professor Feist will use today’s lit skyscrapers as in-camera ‘brushes’ on a way back 80 years to the shadows of the then-impoverished quarter of Shanghai that was the refuge of 20,000 Jews escaping the Germany of her grandparents. Today, it can be seen how the waves of war-ravaged refugees and people fleeing economic devastation tend to leave people numb to the humanity of those in most need. In “Shanghai maps of light + shadow” Professor Feist will use digitally altered photographic records mapped to street locations and brief narrative. She will use a camera as a visual journal to trace her steps and to serve as material for the resulting light paintings. The shadow paintings will be informed by her research on the exhibits and archives of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and connections to scholars or guides who can identify remaining sites of Jewish heritage in the old quarter. This project continues her Engaged Media series, specifically “Involuntary Journeys”, a blog and mapping project about individual refugees’ journeys to the Moria camp on Lesbos, Greece. The goal for both projects is to point to the shared humanity in an effort to overcome the dehumanizing effect of statistics. The empathy that saved 20,000 lives 80 years ago – however different the details were - could guide people in the approach to war refugees today, be they from civil war in Syria or a drug war in Guatemala.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 1 - July 26) :

Professor Li’s research focuses on the new field of epigenetics, which has transformed how people think about genomes. Epigenetics is the study of how heritable changes in organisms can be caused by the modification of gene expression, rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. Epigenetics can explain, for example, why all of the body’s cells contain the same DNA sequence, but bodies contain many different cell types. Indeed, epigenetic mechanisms play essential roles in many biological functions, including genome organization, development, and disease. Professor Li’s studies of epigenetics in a model organism, fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe), have enabled them to use genetics to identify the proteins involved in establishing epigenetic states of DNA in chromosomes and maintaining them after DNA replication. As these proteins and processes are conserved across fission yeast and man, our studies have translational relevance to medicine. He has published a number of papers in peer-reviewed journals, such as Nature, Cell, PNAS, Molecular Cell, etc. He was also named a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences in 2013, given by the Pew Charitable Trusts to the promising young investigators with potential to significantly impact biomedical research. Professor Li has a strong research connection with NYU Shanghai, and established collaboration with Professor Jungseog Kang at NYU Shanghai. He also served on the NYU-Shanghai Faculty Search Committee in 2014 and 2015.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (July 1 - July 26) :

Large cities around the world are facing an unprecedented housing crisis; approximately 1.6 billion people are inadequately housed, while one hundred million are homeless and sixty million are forcibly displaced from their homes. Professor Wong’s research is interdisciplinary and underscores the intimacies of home in shaping political possibilities and diasporic intimacies. Building on her current research-- which examines the political impacts of gentrification in Chinatowns across the United States-- this project expands the scope of her scholarship to investigate how residents in Shanghai, China are responding to forced evictions and uprootedness. Drawing from ethnographic research, archival materials, and oral history interviews with residents across three generations in Shanghai, this project will provide a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which residents are active in the making of urban space and urban politics. This project will focus on three specific neighborhoods in Shanghai, including Xintiandi, Laoximen, and Luowan – a place where her own family was displaced thirty years ago. Given that encounters with forced eviction and displacement has come to increasingly shape the lives of residents in the rapidly changing city, Professor Wong’s research will provide a useful lens to learn about how those who have limited resources and access to formal institutions have fought to stay in their homes. Professor Wong’s primary goals for the project are to preserve place-based knowledge as told by former residents themselves, document strategies of resistance to displacement from past to present, and interrogate the sociocultural boundaries of the urban Chinese diaspora. This project will not only draw critical connections between the displacement occurring in American Chinatowns to the neighborhood changes in Shanghai, it will also result in an open access, web-based digital public history project which would involve the digitization, visualization, and dissemination of the materials collected over the summer. As neighborhoods in large cities like Shanghai continue to disappear due to modernization, and residents are uprooted from their homes, it is important that these individual and collective narratives also at risk of being displaced are well preserved for future generations. 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (June 17 - June 28) :

Professor Looser’s reasons for requesting GRI support to be in Shanghai are twofold: In part, he intends to complete a chapter-length work that he was requested to write as a follow-up to an earlier work of his on the “global image.” This has to do with the ways in which digital art and, in some cases, street art circulate and eventually converge within galleries and art museums in global cities. Shanghai is part of this circulation. Several years ago, Professor Looser visited art museums and galleries, and met with artists and scholars there, as part of an NYU-supported global arts exchange group. He has also continued to be in touch with Francesca Dal Lago, who teaches at NYU Shanghai, about the art world in Shanghai. Completing this while in Shanghai, to verify his ideas in person, is the most ideal. Secondly, Professor Looser has long wished to develop an Asian Cities research group, or program, within NYU--  perhaps as a subset of NYU’s developing urban studies initiatives. He have spoken in the past with Lena Scheen (NYU Shanghai) about this, and would like to finally explore the possibilities for this in more concrete detail with other faculty at NYU Shanghai (Lena Scheen, Anna Greenspan, and others—and perhaps linking up with the Port Cities project that Tansen Sen is helping to direct). 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (May 27 - June 14) :

Professor McCarron is working on a book project that examines connections between Ireland and China; and relations between Irish and Chinese in the United States, the British Empire, and the broader Pacific world. Three of his chapters focus on the many Irish who served in China on behalf of the United States and the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is planning on consulting primary sources at libraries and archives in Shanghai related to this project. Furthermore, Professor McCarron hopes to collaborate with scholars in Shanghai who share similar research interests as him (this includes both NYU Shanghai scholars and Fudan University scholars).