I am a historian of modern China. My teaching and research interests focus on the history of information, material culture, and digital humanities. At its core, my work explores how information technologies – from paper archives to AI tools – change what knowledge is, how it is made and used, and to whom it belongs. More specifically, I focus on China's twentieth century, during which propaganda, censorship, and secrecy served as key instruments of bureaucratic governance and social control.
I am completing my first book project, _The Dustbin of History: Making History in Modern China_. For more than a century, scholars have relied on illicit commerce of de-accessioned archives to study China. Combining archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and digital analysis, my study provides a social biography of paperwork in twentieth-century China. By tracing how state secrets became street commodities and scholarly resources, I show how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was, despite its secrecy and hierarchy, simultaneously a leaky and fragmented organization. As local bureaucrats sold official records as used paper, the most marginalized members of Chinese society, such as urban waste recyclers, have turned the flea market into a counter-archive of historical knowledge. From underground publishing to private museums, their cultural entrepreneurship has created a transnational community of scholar-collectors, opened new subfields of historiography, and unsettled the meaning of archive and the craft of history.
At Dartmouth, my teaching encompasses the full span of Chinese history from antiquity to the present day. In addition to two survey courses -- one on pre-modern and the other on modern China -- I offer a variety of topical courses, ranging from China in the world to history of misinformation in China.
Educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, I joined Dartmouth in 2023 from the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, where I was a British Academy Newton International Fellow.