2025 Workshop Participants

Aria Diao is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Art History at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on Chinese painting from the Song through the Ming dynasties. She is also interested in cross-cultural interactions between China and Japan, Buddhist material culture, and eco-criticism.

​​Yueling Li is a doctoral student in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. She holds B.A. in History of Art and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley. She studies early modern Chinese art, with an interest in transmedial, transcultural and ecological aspects of ceramics.

Annie Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores calligraphy and figure painting of the Song and Yuan periods, with a particular focus on literati culture, the expression of emotion, and the interplay between textual narratives and visual imagery.

Yixin (Star) Song is an incoming Ph.D. student to University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Art History PhD program. His research concerns the history of Chinese landscape painting from the Song to the Yuan dynasties. His other interests include the history of modern architecture, Qing dynasty calligraphy, and critical theories. Star holds a B.A. in Art History with a minor in Cognitive Science from Carleton College and a M.A. in Art History from Bryn Mawr College.

Yuchen Wang is a doctoral student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, specializing in East Asian art. Yuchen’s research focuses on painting and printmaking in 17th century China, with broader interests in book history, material culture, and literary studies—both within and beyond the East Asian context.

Chuyu’s research interests lie in the transcultural and intermediary material culture of medieval China, with a focus on the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty. Before coming to Brown, Chuyu obtained an M.A. in History of Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU and an M.F.A. in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.

Dandan Xu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her primary research interest focuses on Chinese art and visual culture in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Her dissertation recovers the overlooked visual dimensions of the Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) through publishing projects that turned his life into art in late Ming China.

Shelly Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary research interest lies in the intermedial relationship between text, image, and material medium in premodern Chinese painting. She received her B.A. in Global Liberal Studies from NYU in 2018 and her M.A. in History of Art and Archaeology from The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2020.

Yi Zhang is a student of Chinese literature with research interests in book history, material culture, pre-modern media studies, and the history of finance. Her dissertation project, tentatively entitled “Mercantile Mentalities in Early Modern China,” explores the role of merchants in transforming the 16th- and 17th-century cultural landscape through practices such as writing, crafting, trading, and gambling.

Ying Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Art History at the University of Kansas, working under the supervision of Professor Amy McNair. Her research focuses on Chinese landscape painting and the use of color pigments in the late Ming period, with particular attention to the genre of boneless landscape (mogu shanshui). Prior to her doctoral studies, she served as Curator of Education at the Suzhou Museum.

Naren Gao studies Chinese and Inner Asian art in relation to the built environment and transcultural exchange during the Mongol period (13th–14th centuries). Her research focuses on visual and material culture, particularly the decorative arts, among Inner Asian ethnic and sociopolitical groups and institutions. Her current project at Pitt examines tombs, funerary monuments, and burial practices in the eastern Eurasian steppe during the Mongol period.

Junyao is a doctoral candidate from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, specializing in court arts of imperial China and visual culture of the Manchus. His doctoral thesis explores the production and political use of portraiture during the reign of the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century.

Julia Hirsch is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Buddhist material religion, especially Tibetan Buddhist perspectives on the body, art, ritual, relics, death, and dying. Her work has been featured by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, where she serves as a contributing editor.

I work on temporary architectural materials, mainly textiles and glass, in China from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. My research usually takes materiality and techniques as the solid foundation. I am especially interested in how materialities shape people's sacred experiences of ritual venues. Thus, my dissertation is centered on the topic of textiles of sacred spaces in the Qing court, combined with the discussion of sacred space, ritual practices, and cultural interchanges.

Jinyi Liu specializes in Chinese art and material culture, with a focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is writing her dissertation on the court production of marble in eighteenth-century Beijing. Her research interests include embodied craft knowledge, unstable objects in early modern global trade, and material culture of talismanic power.

Meichen Liu is a Ph.D. student in East Asian art history, with a research focus on material culture of late imperial China. She engages with the issues of cross-cultural studies, art and ecology, materiality, and the agency of things. Meichen received her BA from Franklin and Marshall College (2020) and her MA from the University of Chicago (2022) with a thesis on automaton clocks in Qianlong’s court.

Walsh Millette is a PhD student in the department of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. He studies art and architecture of the Yuan and Ming periods and is preparing a site study of Wudang shan, a Daoist mountain dedicated to the martial god Zhenwu.

Sylvia Tongyan Qiu is a second-year Ph.D. student in Art History at UCLA. Her research explores the intersections of early modern globalization and the visual and material culture of the Qing court. Her dissertation examines the relationship between image-making and diplomacy at EurAsian courts between the 17th and 18th centuries. Her research interests also include the consumption of gemstones and natural products in EurAsian courts. She received her MA from UCLA and BA from UCL.

I am a PhD candidate in History of Art at The Courtauld. My doctoral research focuses on Qing court arts and the roles of imperial women in politics, ritual, and religion.

Hao Zhu is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at UCLA. Her research focuses on cultural and artistic exchanges across Mongol Eurasia, tracing how the movement of people, beliefs, materials, and techniques shaped visual culture and the built environment along transregional trade routes. Prior to UCLA, she received an M.A. in EALC from Penn and a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College.