Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: History of Language, dialect, race and ethnicity, twentieth century, China, protest, activism, gender history, Hong Kong

About Me: I am an associate professor of history and co-chair of Women and Gender Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. I am also a Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations, a Wilson Center China Fellow, and the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian studies. I completed my Ph.D. in modern Chinese history at Stanford University in 2016, and received my B.A. in History and Asian Studies from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2008. I am a fourth-generation Italian-American originally from Lakewood, Colorado.

My interest, at its core, is how the identities we ascribe to ourselves or are ascribed to us– including gender, national identity, race, ethnicity, and class– translate into access or the removal of access to cultural, political, and material power. My first book, Dialect and Nationalism, winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize, explores the relationship between language and national identity from the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period. I am currently working on a new project that explores the relationship between gender and post-colonialism in the history of protests in post-war Hong Kong. I speak Mandarin, read standard written Chinese, and speak conversational Cantonese and Japanese.

Recent Publications

Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960. Cambridge University Press(April, 2020).

““Orbiting the Core”: Politics and the Meaning of Chinese Linguistics, 1927-1957.” Twentieth-Century China Special Issue on National Language, Dialect, and the Construction of Identity 42, no. 3 (August, 2016)