IPED Fall 2021 Lecture Series: National Identity in China

Grace Shen is an associate professor of history and director of graduate studies in the history department. Her work centers on questions of identity and aspirations of modernity, change, and self-fulfillment in late-19th to late-20th century China. As a science historian, she has primarily explored this through the lens of knowledge production. Her first book, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and National Identity in Republican China, traces the complex (and often surprising) ways that interactions with “modern science” helped Chinese articulate what they wanted, how they saw themselves, who they wanted to be, and why. Her present book project, Raising the Nation, examines technologies of infant and child care to probe the ways that choices about children shaped China’s understanding of its place in the modern world and the potential of its nation-building project.