Yu Shi
Biography
Yu’s research centers on the social and cultural history of late imperial and modern China, with a particular focus on technology and the arts, the global media industry, folk performance, urban society, and gender studies. Her current research examines the survival of artistic heritage—through negotiation, rupture, and reinvention—amid technological modernity, colonial capitalism, and socialist governance of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Drawing on overlooked gramophone recordings and film artifacts, her dissertation, “Performing in the Margins: Global Media Technologies, Artistic Labor, and the Survivalist Modernity of Traditional Folk Performance in China, 1876–1966,” offers an inter-media labor and technological history of the institutionalization and marginalization of traditional storytelling performance. Beyond the history of popular culture(s), she is also interested in the everyday experiences of non-elite women and people with disabilities in late imperial China, as well as the social history of technology and material culture.
Advanced to Candidacy
Subfield
Late imperial and Modern China, Modern Asia, Global History of Media, Global History of Capitalism, Technology and the Arts, Gender History, History of Popular Cultures, Labor History, Material Cultures, Urban History, History from Below, Critical Theory, Digital Humanities, Chinese Theater and Performance, Asian Theater, Chinese Music
Publications
- “Journey to the Northeast: Producing Chinese Folk Performances in Chōsen Korea with the Japanese Media Industry amid Empire Expansion,” International Journal of Asian Studies (2025), 1-21, 10.1017/S1479591425100429.
- “The Stage Moves on Air: The Mediatization of Quyi in Early Twentieth-Century North China,” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 44, no. 2 (2025): 153-183, cop.2025.a978076.
- “Tensions on the B-Side: The Global Gramophone Industry and Quyi Performances in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing.” Twentieth-Century China 47, no. 3 (2022): 223-242. doi:10.1353/tcc.2022.0029. Chinese translation collected in Liu Dong 刘东 (ed.),《中国研究文摘》[The Digest of Chinese Studies] vol.1 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2025), pp. 106-110.
Awards & Grants
- Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship, UCLA Center for the Study of Women
- Association for Asian Studies East and Inner Asia Council Travel Grant
- Taiwan Studies Graduate Research Funding
- Kawahara Fellowship in Japanese Studies
- UCLA Graduate Research Summer Fellowship
- Meyer & Renee Luskin Graduate Endowed Fellowship
- Phoenix Research Award, University of Chicago
Conference Presentations
- “Underground Singing for Livelihood: Informality as Survival Strategies of Storytelling Performers in 20th-century China,” on the panel Rethinking Professionalization in Traditional East Asian Performances (Panel Organizer) at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Vancouver, Canada, March 12-15, 2026.
- “Journey to the Northeast: Producing Chinese Folk Storytelling Performances in the Cracks of Japanese Expansion,” Symposium: Performance, Media, and Place-making in East Asia, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, April 24-26, 2025.
- “Transnational Gramophone Companies and their Production of Quyi Recordings in Republican China,” Emerging Voices of Sound Studies in East Asia, NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China, June 22-23, 2024.
- “Native Ears to Feed: Producing Strategies of Transnational Gramophone Companies in 1920s China through Quyi Recordings,” on the panel Evidence on Air: Unraveling Modern East Asia in Media Sources (Panel Organizer)at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Seattle, WA, March 14-17, 2024.
- A Paradise in the Slums: How Soundscapes of Quyi Performance Interacted with the Transnational Vaudeville in 1910s Beijing,” on the panel Sonic Entanglements: Familiar, Foreign, and Forbidden Sounds in Modern China, at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Boston, MA, March 16-19, 2023.
