Yunhe Wu

I received my Ph.D. in History at Kent State University summer 2024, specializing in American West, Chinese Diaspora, Pacific Ocean, and History of Social Justice. My dissertation, Becoming Chinese American Men: Chinese Masculinity and Defining American Citizenship in California, from 1865 to 1919 suggests that during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Chinese American men developed a new sense of masculinity when they experienced the hardship of social barriers of the American West, which encouraged them to resist social injustice in the host land and uplift their racial and ethnic groups. I currently have two major publication projects. My first book project on women movement in Cantonese villages in China at the turn of the last century, together with strongly gendered anti-Chinese racial prejudices in the United States immigration policy pushed Cantonese/Chinese men in California to reform their ideas of masculinity. Meanwhile, by reading those valuable Classical Chinese sources, my second book project will be on Cantonese women and American prostitution in the progressive era. Although previous scholarship has a comprehensive discussion on how ordinary Chinese prostitution looks like in San Francisco, my second project would add a new layer to this field by examining the Chinese prostitution issue through a transnational study, highlighting the agency of Cantonese prostitutes, and studying the intersection between Chinese prostitute’s issues, police system, social barriers, and citizenship in American West.

Because I come from a working-class community and one ethnic minority group in China living close to the Northern Border, I’ve committed to first generation college students and other  underrepresented groups in higher education. During my four years as an undergraduate at Beijing Normal University, I volunteered to teach history to young children in the slums of Beijing. When I came to Kent to pursue my Ph.D. and began teaching during the time of COVID, I noticed students struggling and did my best to intervene and help them. I will continue to work on the DEI issue in Higher Education with other history teacher-scholar-activists to make our students feel welcomed and supported.

Courses

HIST 12070 Early America: From Pre-Colonization to the Civil War and Reconstruction

HIST 12071 Modern America: From Industrialization to Globalization

HIST 11051 World History: Modern

HIST 2150 African American History to 1877 (Cuyahoga Community College)

Publication

“‘My Dear Woman: Don’t Ever Think Your Husband Has Betrayed Your Love,’ Negotiating Chinese Masculinity for New Gender Relations during the Progressive Era,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias ( Under Review)

Grants and Fellowships

Graduate Students Staff Grant in Western History Association –2024 Kansas City (Fall 2024)

Research Fellowship in Asian-Pacific History, the German Historical Institute Washington's Pacific Office in UC Berkeley (Spring 2023)

Teaching Assistantship, Kent State University (Fall 2018 to Spring 2022)

Domestic Travel & International Travel Award, Graduate Student Senate, Kent State University (2021) Travel Grant, Department of History, Kent State University (2021)

Research Assistant to Dr. Elaine Frantz for "Policing Pittsburgh from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Centuries (Summer 2021)

Professional Affiliations

Association for Asian American Studies • Western History Association • Organization of American Historians • Coordinating Council for Women in History• The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine