Program Coordinator (Our hero!)
Nathan Oliveira
We are proud of having Nathan in our team!
Co-Chairs
Haiyi Li
Hi! Welcome to our program page. I am Haiyi. I am a graduate student in the Department of History at UIUC. I enjoy meeting new friends and organizing public events. https://history.illinois.edu/directory/profile/haiyili2
Xiaoyan Ren
Xiaoyan Ren studies East Asian information technologies, particularly the technologies used for identifying and documenting human individuals, e.g. ID cards, mugshots, fingerprints, signatures, names, personal seals, etc. Her current project, tentatively titled “Cards of Modernity: Chinese IDs in the Global Information Age,” explores the modern-state building efforts in early-twentieth-century China through the lens of ID cards. Situating China in the global trend of identifying humans with paper documents, she explores how the Chinese government justified and implemented a national ID card policy, and how people resisted and negotiated this small information gadget that tremendously shaped their everyday experiences.
Luming Xu
Born and raised in China’s Northeast, I am interested in the history of my homeland and the coming into being of this region, both politically and intellectually. In history, the place of China’s Northeast, also known as Manchuria, was both the center of the Qing empire’s homeland and the important borderland of modern China. I am now working on the history of China’s political transformation from an empire into a modern nation state, and how that grand process of historical change intertwined with the regional history of Manchuria through the periods of empire, nation-states, and colonial times from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. https://ealc.illinois.edu/directory/profile/lumingx2
Rhonda Ran Huo 霍然
Rhonda is a PhD student in EALC at UIUC. Her research focuses on how Qing imperial publications on the borderlands shaped Han Chinese perceptions of the Qing as a multi-ethnic empire. She is excited to be part of the Asian Studies Group, as it is a great platform for students to learn from each other and engage in communication.
Her website: https://ealc.illinois.edu/directory/profile/ranhuo2
