Current NYU Shanghai Global Research Initiatives Fellows

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. 

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (March 23 - May 2)：

Deng’s dissertation investigates the art historical connection between the Cultural Revolution and the 80s Avant-gardes in China. To this end, they will look at artworks, interviews, manifestos, magazines, journals, and domestic scholarship on site. As the site of the first national congress of the Communist Party, the city has ample sources for their research: the municipal and district archive, the recently opened Liu Haisu archive, and the archives at Long Museum. The majority of the materials belonging to the Revolution and the beginning of the reform era still reside inside the country, and the excavation of a primary archive is one of the biggest contributions that Deng’s dissertation aims to make.

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 15 - May 9)：

Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (March 29 - May 26)：