Yu Yan
YAN Yu is an Associate Professor of Art History at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Harvard University. She received her PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and BA from Peking University, and previously held research positions at NYU Shanghai and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
An art historian by training, her research incorporates methodologies from global history into a basis of in-depth calligraphic and visual analysis. Her doctoral dissertation traced the afterlives of ancient epigraphic scripts—the seal and clerical forms—within the academic community of late Qing scholar-officials, demonstrating how this esoteric calligraphic competence, performed in everyday correspondence, diaries, and even medical prescriptions, encoded scholarly distinction, tracing changing perceptions and modern misinterpretations across East Asia. Her publications have appeared in Chinese Calligraphy and Literature & Art Studies. Over the years, she has also worked to optimize translation norms surrounding Chinese calligraphy for global audiences. Her co-edited English-language glossary of Chinese calligraphic terms will be published this year.
Her current research examines the experiences of Chinese artists displaced to South and Southeast Asia during World War II and the Cold War, situating their artistic networks and cross-border activities within the intertwined geopolitical currents of wartime Asia. Drawing on archival materials and understudied visual sources from across China and India, her current monograph project revisits the “civilizational” discourse that animated Asian intellectual circles in the first half of twentieth century. One related article “Where Civilisations Converged, Where Culture Languished: A Chinese Artist’s Wartime Travels Across South and Southeast Asia, 1939–42” is forthcoming in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.
Beyond academic work, she enjoys the peaceful practices of calligraphy and the guqin, an ancient Chinese zither.