Education
B.A. in History, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007
M.A. in History, California State University, Los Angeles, 2014
M.A. in Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, 2016
Research Interests
As a scholar of modern China, my research interests are rooted in the intellectual developments which occurred between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus specifically on the conceptual evolution of disability as a category of historical analysis. Moreover, I look at the historical processes underpinning the formation of disability as a knowable subject in China. To that end, I marshal sources voicing a variety of related narratives, ranging from the history of medicine to Chinese disability rights movements. It is through these documents that I attempt to recover a muted disability discourse, paying particular attention to shifts in the language used to describe bodies of difference. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how marginalized bodies, once viewed as a collective Other and met with equal parts repulsion and curiosity, assumed new identities as “differently-abled” individuals by the mid-to-late twentieth century.
While historical studies of disability in Euro-American contexts are numerous, and have been produced since the 1970’s, the same cannot be said for scholarship on disability in non-Western contexts. My research interests represent discursive nodes around which future discussions may hopefully arise. China, as a rapidly-developing nation, boasts a reputation for lackluster disability rights—a situation ripe for change.