Max Bohnenkamp is an independent scholar of modern Chinese literature and culture and a freelance translator specializing in Chinese scholarly writings in the humanities and social sciences. He holds a PhD in Chinese literature from the University of Chicago and has research interests in conceptions of popular and mass cultures in China, the adaptation of Chinese folklore for modern and contemporary literature and performing arts, the reception of Western and Soviet literary and dramatic aesthetics in China, and the relationship of creative expression to politics and critical social theory. He is currently completing a book-length study of the cultural, literary, and political origins of the famous Chinese revolutionary musical drama The White-Haired Girl. His most recent translated work is a collection of essays by Chinese scholars of religion, entitled Beyond Indigenization: Christianity and Chinese History in a Global Context (2023).
Mun Young Cho is a professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research interests include poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Cho is the author of The Specter of “The People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (2013), winner of the 2014 Anthony Leeds Prize from the American Anthropological Association. Her recent article includes “Unveiling Neoliberal Dynamics: Government Purchase (goumai) of Social Work Services in Shenzhen's Urban Periphery” (China Quarterly, 2017), “The Neoliberal Production of a ‘Culture of Poverty’ in a Korean Migrant Enclave in Northeast China” (positions: asia critique, 2018), and “The Precariat That Can Speak: The Politics of Encounters between the Educated Youth and the Urban Poor in Seoul” (Current Anthropology, 2022). Cho seeks to trace and newly forge assemblages of poverty, transforming the question of “what poverty is” into that of “what poverty should be.”
Paola Iovene is associate professor of modern Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (2014) and coeditor of Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia's Cold Wars (with Michael Bourdaghs and Kaley Mason, 2021). Her current research interests coalesce around three problems, all having to do with the tenuous line between fact and fiction: the intersections between literature, labor, and social inequality; the ways in which the dichotomy of realism and modernism shapes contemporary Chinese literary historiography; and the uses of actual locations in cinema.
Justyna Jaguścik is senior lecturer in Chinese language, culture, and society at the University of Bern. She received her PhD in Chinese studies from the University of Zurich in 2016. Jaguścik has published articles on feminist poetry, workers’ culture, and gender issues in English, Polish, and German, and has coedited special issues in refereed journals. Her current research explores grassroots cultural activism in the PRC and focuses on independent theater productions.
Siting Jiang is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her current research focuses on modern Chinese literature and the question of reading. Her other research interests include East Asian popular music, sound studies, and genre studies.
Li Ruo worked at several factories in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Beijing before returning to her hometown in Henan in 2017. She has published extensively online and was nominated “Internet Queen” by the website Renjian 人间 (The Livings) in 2016. Li Ruo's short stories and poems, which mostly deal with rural themes, have been collected in an anthology published by Migrant Workers Home titled Buguniao de tijiaosheng 布谷鸟的啼叫声 (Cry of the Cuckoo, 2017), and have appeared in major literary journals and magazines such as Beijing Wenxue 北京文学 (Beijing Literature), Huacheng 花城 (Flower City), and Duzhe 读者 (Readers). Li Ruo's poetry has also been included in the Beipiao shipian 北漂诗篇 (Poetry by Northern Drifters) series cocurated by the poet and editor Shi Libin 师力斌, while two of her stories are featured in the multiauthor anthology Laodongzhe de xingchen 劳动者的星辰 (The Laborers’ Stars, 2022).
Lü Tu is an independent researcher, writer, and activist. After receiving her BA in plant biochemistry and physiology, she went on to pursue an MA in women and development and a PhD in development sociology. Lü Tu was a lecturer and then associate professor at China Agricultural University from 1990 to 2002. She has lived and worked in various countries, including China, Germany, Belgium, Indonesia, and Singapore. From 2007 to 2017, Lü Tu devoted her efforts to promoting migrant workers’ rights by organizing community activities as well as courses and workshops for migrant workers. Her research in China's urban villages and workplaces culminated into three books: Zhongguo xin gongren: Mishi yu jueqi 中国新工人: 迷失与崛起 (China's New Workers: Lost and Rising Up, 2013); Zhongguo xin gongren: Wenhua yu mingyun 中国新工人:文化与命运 (China's New Workers: Culture and Destiny, 2015); and Zhongguo xin gongren: Nügong zhuanji 中国新工人: 女工专辑 (China's New Workers: Biographies of Women Workers, 2017). Her current interests are natural farming, environment, and music. She has written more than ten songs.
Federico Picerni is a postdoctoral research fellow in Chinese literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he also obtained his PhD in a joint degree program with Heidelberg University. His research addresses the dynamic relationship between literature and society in China, with a focus on past and present worker writers and poets, and he is currently pursuing a project on critical realism and unrealism in contemporary fiction. His dissertation, based on a combination of textual analysis and fieldwork, investigates the literary and social practice of the Picun Literature Group. A side project concerns a transcultural perspective on Sino-Italian cultural productions. His output has appeared in International Quarterly for Asian Studies, Made in China Journal, and Asian Studies, among others. Currently teaching Chinese language and literature at the University of Bologna as an adjunct lecturer, he also works as a literary translator from Chinese.
Jiarui Sun is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Focusing on modern and contemporary China, her research brings together linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, and the sociology of everyday life.
Wanning Sun is professor of media and communication studies at University of Technology Sydney. A fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2016, she is best known in the field of China studies for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration in China. Her research on the cultural politics of inequality can be found in her books, including Maid in China: Media, Morality and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009), Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media and Cultural Practices (2014), and Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences (2023).
Chun Chun Ting is assistant professor at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She teaches Chinese literature and cinema; activism and art; and youth and urban cultures. Ting is currently working on a manuscript on spatial politics and social movements in postcolonial Hong Kong. She also writes on Hong Kong literature and culture; Sinophone documentaries and films; and migrant workers’ literary production in contemporary China.
Maghiel van Crevel is professor of Chinese language and literature at Leiden University. A specialist of contemporary poetry, van Crevel has published a dozen books, including scholarly monographs and edited volumes, literary translations, and language textbooks. His work conjoins literary studies and translation studies with ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in China since the early 1990s, as described in his “Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene.” At Leiden University Libraries, van Crevel has built a unique collection of the unofficial journals that have shaped the face of China's poetry today (this is freely accessible online at https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/unpo). His current book project is on China's battler poetry, a.k.a. migrant worker poetry (dagong shige).
Wang Dezhi is one of the founders of Migrant Workers Home in Picun, Beijing. After leaving his hometown in Inner Mongolia in 1995, Wang took up many different jobs, and in 2002 he cofounded the New Workers Art Troupe, creating and performing in cross-talk shows. He has studied labor law and has provided legal aid and organized workshops for migrant workers. In 2012 he launched the “Migrant Workers New Year Gala,” a New Year celebration program created and performed entirely by migrant workers. Wang also set up the “New Workers Documentary Group” and has directed several documentaries and short films. Currently he is managing the secondhand nonprofit stores of the Migrant Workers Home, through which he hopes to continue to support the activities of the organization.
Yang Zhan is assistant professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences and a committee member of the China Research and Development Network at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is a cultural anthropologist by training. Her research interests include urbanization, migration, mobility, and temporality and anthropological theory. Her articles have appeared in Urban Studies, positions: asia critique, Dialectical Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Anthropological Forum, and China Information, among others. Zhan is the winner of the 2020 Eduard B. Vermeer Prize for best article and is shortlisted for the 2021 Holland Prize. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Brutal Temporality: Venturing Migrants and the Cultural Politics of the Future on China's Urban Fringe, is now under review.
Zhang Huiyu is a research professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University. He received his PhD in modern Chinese literature from Peking University in 2009, and was a visiting researcher in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, in 2015–16. His research interests include film and visual culture, grassroots communication and media, and the social history of journalism. He is the author of several articles and books, including Shijue xiandaixing: 20 shiji Zhongguo de zhuti chengxian 视觉现代性:20世纪中国的主体呈现 (Visual Modernity: The Emergence of the Subject in Twentieth-Century China, 2012), Zhuti meiying: Zhongguo dazhong wenhua yanjiu 主体魅影:中国大众文化研究 (The Phantom of the Subject: Studies in Chinese Popular Culture, 2017), and Wenhua chuanbo: Zhuanxing shidai de Zhongguo dianying 文化传播:转型时代的中国电影 (Conveying Culture: Chinese Cinema in an Era of Transformations, 2022).
Yurou Zhong is an associate professor of East Asian studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature and culture, writing systems and literacy, history of linguistic thought, and sound studies. She is the author of Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (2019).
