Yushu Geng
I am currently a final year History PhD student at University of Cambridge. Growing up in China, I came to the UK for my sixth form education in 2009. I was awarded my BA in History in 2014 and MA in Modern History in 2015, both from the University of Durham. I completed my MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at Cambridge in 2016.
My previous research focused on women and gender in modern Chinese history. My masters dissertation at Durham, under the supervision of Professor Paul Bailey, explored different types of ideal womanhood through a reading of gendered advertising images. My MPhil dissertation at Cambridge, "Early Chinese Feminisms, 1897-1911", supervised by Dr. Rachel Leow, examined different strands of feminist thoughts and focused on the relationship between Chinese nationalism and feminism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This project served the dual goals of contesting Eurocentrism in contemporary Gender Studies that often overlooked theoretical contributions of the Global South, and of rescuing Chinese feminism from the hegemonic power of the nationalist narrative.
My PhD project looks at the discourses of obscenity and the practices of moral regulation in China and Singapore during the 1920s and 1930s. Triangulating between archives in London, Shanghai and Singapore, I take a multi-sited approach and locate my project in transnational and global frameworks. I am particularly interested in exploring the usefulness of advertisements as historical sources. My broader research interests include history of gender and sexuality, print cultures, feminism, nationalism and global history. My regional focus is China, but during my PhD training I am also branching out to investigate the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Chinese communities in Singapore.
Part I Paper 23: World History Since 19414
Historical Arguments and Practice (Gender)
‘The Morals of Modernity: Travelling Yinshu (Obscene Books) between Shanghai and Colonial Singapore, 1920s‒1930s’, International History of East Asia Seminar, University of Oxford, UK (May 2020).
'A Gendered Reading Public: Obscene Publications and Spectatorship in Republican China', CHANGE Re-envisioning Gender in China Conference, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (February 2019).
'Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in China and Singapore', 1919-1937, Graduate Workshops in Economic and Social History, University of Cambridge, UK (October 2018).
'Early Chinese Feminisms (1897-1911)', Gender and Sexuality History Workshop, University of Cambridge (May 2018).
Contact
Tags & Themes
Lucy Cavendish College, Lady Margaret Road, Cambridge, CB3 0BU
Key publications
'What is Obscenity?: Morality and Modernity in 1920s China', China Perspectives 2020/3.