Assembling Chinese History

The goal of this seminar is to build a community of researchers in the history of China and the Sinophone world, with a focus on understanding the relationships between self, social frameworks, and human geography in the modern era. We'll discuss critical methodologies and research ethics for conducting and using oral interviews; contextualizing and reading archives and a range of published and unpublished documents; understanding material culture; and problems of interpreting evidence at scale. Students will work on their own research project, which could be a paper, film, zine, website, etc. Ability in a spoken or written Chinese language strongly encouraged.