PHD
PhD Supervisor: Carolyn Biltoft / Bernard Keo (co-supervision)
This project examines bodily life and everyday experience in Maoist China from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Focusing on ordinary people’s encounters with scarcity, illness, labor, shifting family relations, social mobilization, and changing moral worlds, it explores how large-scale socialist transformations were lived, felt, remembered, and narrated at the intimate level of the body.
Profile
Ziru Yang is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History and Politics. Her research interests include the cultural history of socialism in Maoist China, body and memory, emotions and meaning-making, local religion, belief and myth, as well as experimental history as a methodological approach. Her thesis asks how historians might imagine and represent the bodily stories of unnamed individuals in nuanced ways while remaining grounded in rigorous historical inquiry. Ziru completed her master’s degree in the department in 2024 and holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Renmin University of China. She was a co-organizer and panelist at the 2026 Annual Pierre du Bois Doctoral Workshop, “Across the Bamboo Curtain: Economic, Political, and Technological Exchanges Between East and West During the Cold War, 1950s–1970s,” where she presented her ongoing work in experimental history.
Research Interests
- Trauma History
- Contemporary Chinese History
- Intellectual History
- Social History
- Asian History
- Gender History
- Oral History
Areas of expertise
- Cultural Histories of the PRC
- Microhistory
- Trauma Study PhD