Ph.D. Candidates in Chinese History

Rebecca Wu joined Harvard’s Ph.D. program in History and East Asian Languages in Fall 2025. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in History (2025). Her senior thesis, which examined petitioning practices in late-Ming China...

Wenxin Xiao's research focuses on the social and cultural history of late imperial China. She received a bachelor's degree in History and Data Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in RSEA from Harvard. Her previous work includes a...

Axl Cheng works on Muslims and Islam in late imperial China, with a focus on how law, economy, and empire shaped communal identities under Qing rule. She joins the HEAL program in Fall 2025. She holds a BA from New York University in Middle Eastern and...

Kent (Bowen) Zheng is interested in historiography, state formation, and rhetorics of legitimacy in medieval China. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 2022, where he joint-majored in Historical Studies and Classical Studies. Working on his senior...

Ben Hales entered Harvard’s History and East Asian Languages (HEAL) program in 2024. He researches the modern history of China’s relationship with Central Asia, focussing in particular on settler-indigenous and sedentary-pastoral relations from the 1940s...

Isaiah is a PhD student in Harvard’s History and East Asian Languages program. He received his BA from Yale College in 2021 and his AM from Harvard in 2023, where he wrote a thesis on the classical commentaries and political philosophy of the late Ming...

Mengyuan Li 李梦媛 received her B.A. in Chinese History from Nankai University and her M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her Master's thesis examines the intellectual development of the prominent seventeenth-century Chinese...

Aaron Throness is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations specializing in the political history of Ming China. Aaron received his BA in Asian Area Studies (2020) and MA in History (2022) from the University of British...

 

Annie Zhanling Wang is a social historian of late imperial China and Inner Asia, with a focus on gender, family relations, voice, and empire. She has written about friendships between Manchu women in Beijing and Han women in Jiangnan in the eighteenth...

Seongun Park studies the political, intellectual, and environmental history of late imperial China. His current research examines the political, epistemic, and cultural frameworks that shaped disaster discourse in China from the sixteenth to the...