Cathy Shen is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) of premodern Chinese literature and comparative literature at Harvard University. She specializes in literature of the Middle Period (Six Dynasties and Tang) and is interested in poetic emotion, affect theory, genre...
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...
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...
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...
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...
William Julian’s work concerns the changes in perceptions and portrayals of the northwest (西北) during the Republican Period. He seeks to locate these sources not only within broader Chinese discourses on borderlands, but also within their global context...
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’...
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...
