Shelly Chan
Assistant Professor

Email: pchan4@wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 263-1837
Office: 4120 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4015 Mosse Humanities

Office Hours: On Leave

Education: PhD: University of California-Santa Cruz; MA: University of California-Santa Cruz; MA: University of British Columbia; B.A. University of British Columbia.

Bio Sketch:

I am a historian of modern China, specializing in nation, society, and culture. My broad interests lie in transnational and global processes, gender and women’s history, as well as postcolonial and cultural studies, with a special emphasis on migration and diaspora.

My research concerns two questions: What was diaspora in Chinese history? What was Chinese about the Chinese diaspora? To begin to answer these questions, my book project explores the “discovery” of diaspora in China from 1890 to 1966, focusing on key moments in which diaspora erupted as a site of desires and conflicts. It argues that ties between China and Chinese elsewhere were neither determined nor unchanging. Rather, they represented a shifting dialogue about global historical forces.

In addition, my work attempts to reconceptualize “diaspora” as an analytical concept by drawing attention to its temporality. I ask what can be gained by thinking in time, in addition to thinking in space.

Before joining UW-Madison, I was assistant professor of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, 2009-2011.

Works In Progress:

• Moments of Diaspora: A Transnational History of Modern China (book manuscript).
•  “The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to Chinese Communities in Global Context.”
• “Disobedient Diaspora: Qiaosheng (Overseas Chinese Students) in Mao’s China, 1958-1966.”

Selected Publications:

• Book Review. China’s Left-Behind Wives: Families of Migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s-1950s by Shen Huifang. The International Journal of Chinese Diasporic Studies (forthcoming in Chinese).
• “Rethinking the ‘Left-Behind’ in Chinese Migrations: A Case of Liberating Wives in Emigrant South China in the 1950s.” In Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Centuries. Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur, eds. Leiden: Brill Publishers (forthcoming June/July 2013).
•  “A Maidservant of the Revolution: He Xiangning and Chinese Feminist Nationalism in the 1920s-1930s.” Occasional Paper 185 (May 2007), Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• “Breaking the Silence. Review of E. G. Perrault, Tong: The Story of Tong Louie, Vancouver’s Quiet Titan.” BC Studies 144 (December 1, 2004): 141-142.
• “The Myriad Life of a Community: Chinese Organizations in Vancouver.” Discussion Paper, Chinese Migration Series, Diana Lary ed., Centre for Chinese Research, University of British Columbia, Jan. 2003.

Awards:

• Faculty Internal Research Grant, University of Victoria, 2010, 2011
• Dissertation Writing Fellowship, History Department, UC-Santa Cruz, 2008
• Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Institute for Humanities Research, UC-Santa Cruz, 2007
• Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2006
• Dissertation Research Grant, University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, 2005
• Humanities Global Outreach Fellowship, UC-Santa Cruz, 2003-2005

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 201 - The Historian’s Craft - Topic: Portraying China since Marco Polo - Syllabus 2013 (pdf)
• History 225 - Chinese Migrations since 1500 - Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History 342 - History of the People’s Republic of China to the Present - Syllabus 2011 (pdf)

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "Sex, Bodies, and Modernity in China" Syllabus 2012 (pdf)