“History rarely moves in a linear line. Neither does my research.”
My research explores how history is produced, communicated, and mobilized through education, space, and public memory. Across projects on Chinese indentured labour in nineteenth-century Lima, migrant couriers in contemporary Shanghai, social institutions in early modern London, and children's wartime memory in East Asia, I use archival research, interviews, quantitative analysis, and storytelling with digital tools including historical mapping, Voyant, and Audacity—to examine the relationship between ideology, civic institutions, and historical narrative. I’m especially interested in how historical knowledge shapes governance and how museums and digital platforms translate trauma, justice, and collective memory for public audiences.
After the Coolie Trade: Chinese Migrants and the Reshaping of Legal and Social Life in Peru, 1872–1900
This research serves as my capstone project at the University of Toronto
An ongoing study examines how Chinese migrants navigated changing labor conditions, legal status, and community formation following the decline of the coolie trade in late nineteenth-century Peru. Drawing on archival fieldwork in Lima and Guangzhou, I use judicial records, diplomatic correspondence, community association materials, newspapers, and other multilingual sources to reconstruct migrants’ everyday strategies of adaptation and self-determination. I have conducted research at Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs archive (RREE), the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Beneficencia China collections in Lima, the National Library of Peru, and Jinan University’s World Museum of Overseas Chinese Literature in Guangdong. This study explores how migrants utilized these tools as mechanisms for social and legal self-determination following the collapse of the contract labour system.
Survival Infrastructure: How Couriers in Shanghai Build Stability from Precarity
This project examines the gig economy in contemporary Shanghai, China, analyzing how food-delivery couriers utilize peer networks, platform management strategies, and individual workarounds to navigate the instability of their profession. We conceptualize delivery work as transitional labour, characterized by flexibility but marked by insecurity, enabling migrant workers to sustain themselves while transitioning between jobs, cities, or life stages. Drawing on mixed-methods fieldwork, including bilingual interviews, digital questionnaires, and participant observation, our findings demonstrate that flexibility is often nominal, as income dependence, extended working hours, and precarious living conditions constrain workers’ autonomy. This study investigates how migrant workers construct "survival infrastructure" to address precarity and respond to the disciplinary pressures of algorithmic management.
From Textbooks to Red Tourism: CCP’s Educational Strategies for Ideological Governance
This project examines the impact of patriotic education on political belonging among youth in contemporary China, tracing its evolution from the Cultural Revolution to Xi Jinping’s initiative of building an “Educational Superpower.” The analysis centers on schools, museums, study tours, and Red Education Bases to assess how the Chinese Communist Party constructs national identity through lessons, rituals, exhibitions, and historical narratives. Drawing on policy analysis, field observations in Jiangxi, Hunan, Shanxi, and Hubei, and semi-structured questionnaires administered to 30 students aged 17 to 22, the study investigates how young people interpret, accept, negotiate, or resist ideological messages. By conceiving educational spaces as sites of political socialization, this project demonstrates how patriotic education integrates formal instruction with emotional experience to shape understandings of the nation, citizenship, and political authority.
This project explores how the wartime experiences of children in Asia—especially those in Nanjing during World War II—are remembered and represented through digital public history. Drawing on field visits, museum exhibits, oral histories, and survivor interviews, it centers the experiences of children affected by displacement, violence, and the Comfort Women system. Developed in support of WongAvery Asia Pacific Peace Museum and ALPHA Education’s Living History Hope & Peace digital museum, the project examines how museums and digital storytelling can preserve difficult memories while making them accessible to younger audiences. Through visual and archival storytelling, it considers how experiences of trauma, survival, and justice are translated into forms of public memory that can support historical education across generations.
Mapping the Civic Roles of London’s Royal Hospitals through Digital Humanities
This study investigates how London’s Royal Hospitals integrated charity, confinement, and discipline to manage marginalized populations during the early modern period. Focusing on Bridewell, Bethlem, and Christ’s Hospital, it demonstrates that these institutions addressed distinct segments of the urban poor and contributed to a comprehensive system of civic governance and social control following the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on primary sources such as John Stow’s Survey of London, John Taylor’s writings on Bridewell, and A New Mad Tom of Bedlam, the research combines close reading with digital humanities methods. These include the Map of Early Modern London’s Agas Map for historical mapping, Voyant Tools for textual analysis, and Audacity for soundscape reconstruction. This methodological approach elucidates how institutional location, language, and representation connected charity with moral discipline and civic authority. By examining the Royal Hospitals collectively, the study demonstrates that various forms of institutional care operated in concert within a broader civic strategy, linking urban space, social classification, and public representations of authority.
