Fellows

Rolf Scheuermann holds a diploma in Buddhist Studies from the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute, New Delhi (2004), and a Magister (2010) as well as a doctorate (2016) in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies from the University of Vienna. His doctoral research explored the Four Dharmas of Gampopa, an influential 10th-century Tibetan Buddhist key text. His recent research focuses particularly on eco-Buddhist movements and Buddhist responses to the climate crisis, (Tibetan) Buddhist strategies for coping with the future, translation, and cultural exchange processes. He served as research coordinator of the Käte Hamburger Centres of Erlangen and Heidelberg and as a Locum Professor for Tibetan Studies (Professurvertretung) at the Universities of Leipzig and Munich.

Phillip Grimberg is a cultural historian specializing in the material cultures of late Imperial and contemporary China. He studied Chinese Studies and International Law at Universities in Germany (Cologne, Bonn) and China (Beijing, Hangzhou). After receiving his PhD in 2014 he held several research and teaching positions at different institutions (Bonn, Frankfurt, Erlangen, Naples, Heidelberg). In 2021 he completed his Habilitation in Chinese Studies at the University of Erlangen where he serves as an Adjunct Professor. In 2023 he was elected as a member of AGYA at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. At the University of Heidelberg he is currently working on a research project with the title Guwantu – Die „Illustrationen antiker Kuriosa“ des Yongzheng-Kaisers (1723–1735). Ein Beispiel höfischer Sammlungspraxis und –dokumentation in der Qing-Zeit, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung (https://www.fritz-thyssen-stiftung.de/fundings/guwantu).

Mu Cao is an associate professor in the History Department at Nankai University, China, specializing in Chinese Environmental History and Urban Environmental History. She earned her degrees from Nankai University and has conducted research at the University of Kansas (2011-2012), the University of Freiburg (2015), and as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich (2016-2017). Her current research focuses on Chinese urban environmental issues since the early modern period. She has published extensively in both Chinese and English and has led and participated in several national and provincial-level research projects. In 2024, she was selected for Nankai University's "Hundred Young Academic Leaders Development Program". She currently serves as a committee member of The Environmental History Committee of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences and as a board member of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO).

Chan Koonchung is a Sinoscript (Huawen) writer of novels 盛世 (The Fat Years), 裸命 (The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver), 建丰二年 (The Second Year of Jianfeng,) 北京零公里 (Beijing Zero Point), and 香港三部曲 (Hong Kong Trilogy). He is the 2013 Writer of the Year of the Hong Kong Book Fair, and winner of two The Dream of Red Chamber awards. A Fellow of the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University, his nonfiction books include一种华文多种谂头 (One Huawen Many Attributes), 马克思主义与文学批评 (Marxism and Literary Criticism), 乌托邦恶托邦异托邦 (Utopia Dystopia Heterotopia), 中国天朝主义与香港 (China‘s Tianchaoism and Hong Kong), and 活出时代的矛盾 (Living Out the Contradictions of Our Time).

Hello, my name is Chia-ju Chang, and I am a professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY. My research focuses on ecocriticism, critical animal studies, and contemplative studies. I hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. As an authorized Zen teacher, I lead Zen meditation courses and workshops at Brooklyn College and other venues. Within my department, I established the Chinese and Contemplative Studies Minor and have been actively developing research and pedagogy in what I term "critical meditation studies" or "Chan ecocriticism." Currently, I serve as the Convener of the Committee on Humanities, Arts, and Ethics for the UN World Meditation Day. My latest book, Thinking Like a Zen Master: The Multiverse of Zen Koans (《像禪師一樣思考：禪宗公案的多重宇宙》, 2024), explores the Zen koans as an indispensable spiritual resource for working through the uncertainties of our time, both existential and beyond.

Dai Jinhua, graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University and taught in the Department of Film Literature at the Beijing Film Academy for 11 years. Since 1993, she has been teaching at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture at Peking University. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Peking University and the Director of the Peking University Film and Cultural Studies Center. Her research focuses on film, mass media, and gender studies, and she has offered numerous courses such as "Close Reading of Films," "The Cultural History of Chinese Cinema," "Theory and Practice of Cultural Studies," and "Gender and Writing." She has authored works including *Surfacing from the Depths of History*, *Gendering China*, *Invisible Writing*, *The Boat Across*, *Breaking Out of the Mirror City*, and so on. Her books and papers have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Korean, Japanese, German, and French.

Dingru Huang is the Rumsey Family Junior Professor in the Humanities and the Arts at the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University. Before joining Tufts, she was at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies. Dingru received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Her research interests include wartime cultural production, science fiction, and environmental humanities in Global East Asia, particularly the roles played by nonhuman animals. Her scholarly work has been published or is forthcoming in Ex-position, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Chung-wai Literary Quarterly, and Comparative Literature in China. Aside from academic research, Dingru enjoys writing short stories in Chinese. Her stories about animals have appeared in Shanghai Literature and UNITAS.

Shipeng Li, a doctoral candidate from the Department of History at Tsinghua University in China, is a visiting doctoral student at Heidelberg University during the summer semester of 2025. His research interests encompass the societal and cultural dynamics of late imperial China through to contemporary China. Currently, his main research focus is on the history of the Mao era. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Building Our New Great Wall: Forests and State Building in Northern China (1937-1987),” seeks to analyze the political and social dimensions of Socialist China through the lenses of technological history, environmental history, cultural history, and global history.

LONG Qilin (1981-), is a professor, doctoral supervisor, and postdoctoral cooperative supervisor at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Sun Yat-sen University, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chinese at the University of Macau, a visiting scholar at the Department of Chinese at Fudan University, the Asia Center at Harvard University, the Department of Chinese at Peking University, and the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He mainly engages in research on contemporary Chinese ecological literature, the phenomenon of intertextuality between Chinese literature and text, and Chinese culture and literature in the transitional period. He has been selected for the Guangdong Province Excellent Young Teacher Training Funding Program (2015), the Guangdong Special Support Program for Young Cultural Talents (2017), the Guangzhou High level Talents Program (2019), and the Shanghai Oriental Talents Program Youth Project (2024). He has published over 180 academic papers in journals such as "Literary Review," "Series on Modern Chinese Literature Research," "Southern Literary World," "Literary Competition," and "Academic Research," hosted 5 National Social Science Fund projects, independently published 6 academic monographs including "Eco-China: Literary Presentation and Cross-cultural Studies," and "A Preliminary Discussion on the Intertextuality of Text and Text in Chinese Literary Research Works." Also published a collection of essays and novels titled "Refusing to Forget in Silence" (Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore 2020) and a literary review titled "Between Professional Discourse and Popular Discourse" (China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Press 2025).He has been selected for the publication plan of the Chinese Literature Critics Association's "Woodpecker Literature Collection - Literary Critics' Works Collection" (2024), the 7th "Woodpecker Cup" Chinese Literature and Art Criticism Excellent Short Comment Works (2022) by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the second prize of the 9th Philosophy and Social Science Excellent Achievement Award in Guangdong Province (2021), and the second prize of the 14th Social Science Excellent Achievement Award in Hunan Province (2020).

Zimu Zhang is an environmental humanities scholar working on visual culture, eco-cinema and ecofeminist arts. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. She is the recipient of the 2022 Landhaus fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU and 2023 VisitANTS fellowship in Critical Studies of Biodiversity and the Anthropocene Research at University of Oulu, Finland. Her current research projects focus on hydrosociality of the creative arts and cultural narratives from the Southern China waterscape, delta and archipelagos. Along with her academic research, Zimu also practices filmmaking and curation.

Joanne Miyang Cho is a Professor of History at William Paterson University of New Jersey (USA). She previously taught at Hope College (Michigan) and at Ewha Womans University Summer School (South Korea). Her latest publications are co-edited volumes on modern Korea: Transnationalism and Migration in Global Korea and Korean Culture in the Global Age (forthcoming). Her edited/co-edited publications in East Asian-German Studies include German and China, Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Germany and East Asia, East Asian-German Cinema, Musical Entanglements, Gendered Encounters, Germany and Korea,and Germany and Japan. Her co-edited volume, German-speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1933-1950, is forthcoming. Her current book project is entitled German-speaking Jewish Refugees and the Chinese in Shanghai, 1938-1949. She serves as a series co-editor for Palgrave Studies in Asian German Studies. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship, the Max Planck Institute for History, the Leibniz Institute for European History, and the DAAD.

Yiran Wang obtained a PhD degree in anthropology from the University of Amsterdam in 2019. Her research has been focusing on intimate and family relationships, and the “becoming” of subjectivities, of queer women in contemporary China. Her academic writing has been inspired by transnational gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, feminist new materialism, and affect theory. Wang published peer-reviewed journal articles on how transnationally and intra-regionally travelling discourses about female non-heteronormative gender expressions and family power dynamics have influenced lesbian subculture and activism in contemporary China. She contributed a book chapter to an edited volume titled Affective Intimacies, in which she adopted insights from affect theory to interpret empirical data about female same-sex love and sex in 21st-Century Chinese context. She also developed a methodology case study for the SAGE Research Methods platform, introducing how affective experiences can be studied in ethnographic inquiries into gender and sexuality issues.