#  Tien Yi Li 

Ph.D. Candidate in HEAL/China

 

 

 



   ![A Chinese man wearing a dark shirt](/sites/g/files/omnuum3106/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2026-08/li_tienyi.jpeg?itok=cpTVfxVW) 

 



 

 email <tienyili@fas.harvard.edu> 

 



 

Tien Yi is a PhD Student in History and East Asian Languages, specializing in the intellectual and cultural history of Modern China. He is especially interested in the hermeneutical gap between the inner lives of historical actors and the historians’ interpretations. He practices deliberately extensive source criticism and slow reading to ask: (1) how historical ideas were inscribed into a variety of media, (2) the provenance of these artifacts and their conditions of production, (3) how these objects have changed before reaching us, and (4) what historians should admit as evidence and how we could recover meaning in them. His previous work has examined what art and architecture reveal about ideas of Chineseness, as well as how the discourse surrounding the diary (*riji*) as a genre should guide our interpretation of these texts from twentieth-century China. He received a BS in Architectural Studies from Northeastern University and SM in History, Theory, Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## People
    
     [Graduate Students](/people/graduate-students) [Ph.D. Candidates in Chinese History](/people/phd-candidate-chinese-history) [Ph.D. Candidates in HEAL](/people/phd-candidate-heal)
- ## PhD Advisor
    
     [Advisor: Arunabh Ghosh](/phd-advisor/advisor-arunabh-ghosh)