Project I: Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs, University of Michigan Press, 2025

• Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs takes readers on a journey through the lives and legacies of Chinese female revolutionary martyrs, revealing how their sacrifices have been remembered, commemorated, and manipulated throughout history. This innovative book blends historical narratives with personal narratives, creating an “imaginary museum” where the stories of these women are brought to life. Author Xian Wang employs this imaginary museum to create a conceptual space mirroring an actual museum that juxtaposes historical narratives with countermemories of Chinese female revolutionaries, such as the prominent writer Ding Ling. Exploring Ding’s experiences with martyrdom and the commemoration of female revolutionary martyrs associated with her, the book provides a compelling argument that female revolutionary martyrdom reinforces, rather than rejects, the traditional concept of female chastity martyrdom. Narratives that challenge established gender norms, particularly those surrounding female chastity, have often been silenced or overlooked in the collective memory of these female revolutionary martyrs. By delving into these countermemories, Wang provides fresh insights into gendered violence, memories, and politics in modern Chinese literature and culture.

Project II: The Lure of Labor: Remaking Time and Space in Socialist China

• This project examines how literature and art made work desirable in socialist China from 1949 to 1976. Drawing on fiction, poetry, film, painting, comics, propaganda posters, and material culture, it defines the “lure” of labor as the aesthetic and affective appeal linking work to moral virtue, pleasure, modernity, intimacy, and collective identity. It argues that this lure reorganized time and space through synchronized schedules, accelerated production, deferred private desires, transformed landscapes, workers’ villages, and collectivized domestic work. The project traces the contradictions of this process, as liberation and discipline, pleasure and sacrifice, and the glorification and transcendence of labor remained intertwined in efforts to realize socialist utopia in the present.

Project III: Disability and the Socialist Body in Chinese Literature and Film

• Research for The Lure of Labor has also opened new directions in my scholarship. While studying representations of work, bodies, technology, and productivity, I encountered substantial materials concerning disability. These sources have led me to envision a third scholarly book on disability in socialist China, examining disabled bodies in relation to labor, rehabilitation, productivity, gender, and socialist ideas of human transformation.

Project IV: Long 2008: China, America, and a Turning Point (public-facing book project)

• I am currently writing a public-facing book titled Long 2008. That year marked a turning point in both global and personal history: the Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympics, and the global financial crisis coincided with the beginning of my studies in the United States. The project examines 2008 as a crucial moment in the transformation of U.S.-China relations and the broader global order, asking how these interconnected events reshaped China, the United States, and their perceptions of one another. I also envision developing an undergraduate course from this research, using 2008 as a lens through which students can examine the forces that have shaped our contemporary world.