Faculty Expertise on Contemporary China

She received her MA and PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature (2016) from the Ohio State University. In 2016-19, she held an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship and served as a visiting assistant professor of Chinese at Oberlin College. Dr. Zhang’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of second language acquisition, Chinese language pedagogy, and Chinese rhetoric. Her projects have received several awards including from the Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium, National Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Association, Chinese Language Teachers Association, and National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. Her current China-related research project is a book manuscript on the role of literary language and cultural references in modern and contemporary Chinese discourse, and its effects on intercultural interactions by non-native speakers of Mandarin at the workplace in China. She is also interested in chengyu usage in multimodal performances in Chinese digital media using big-data methods.

He received his MA (Honours) in English Literature and Psychology at the University of Glasgow and trained as a newspaper journalist with the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) in London. He earned his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017, for which he spent two years as a China Studies Fellow at Nanjing University. Before joining DKU, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Dr Hunter Gordon’s research is at the intersection of performance and history, with a primary expertise in kunqu. He is particularly interested in the relationship between culture and its written or audiovisual record, together with the controls and contingencies to which the record and archives are subject. In addition to his academic work, he has translated subtitles for the Jiangsu Province Kunju Theatre for over five years and worked as producer on two major kunqu shows. He sings the xiaosheng role and regularly performs on the avocational kunqu circuit in China and beyond. Prior to his doctorate, Dr Hunter Gordon worked as a reporter at The Observer in London before spending several years in Shanghai and Beijing, where he studied Chinese and worked in various media roles. At DKU his teaching interests include Chinese Drama and Media and the Arts.

In 2017, she obtained a double PhD Degree in Politics from the University of Warwick (UK) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). In March 2018, her PhD dissertation entitled “Climate Revolution or Long March, The Politics of Low-Carbon Transformation in China, The Case of the Power Sector” was awarded the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels for Sinology. Before coming to DKU, in 2018-2019 she did a postdoc at the Oxford University China Center. Coraline’s research interests cover China’s domestic politics of environment, climate change and energy, as well as China’s increasing role in the global governance of environmental issues. Her most recent publications include “Ecological Civilization and the Political Limits of a Chinese Concept of Sustainability”. China Perspective, 2018/4 pp 39-52 http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/8463”

oursework in Mandarin Chinese at Tsinghua University, received his MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto (2017). In 2016-2017 he was a Visiting Instructor in the Department of Political Science at Davidson College and he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. Dr. Rathnam’s fields of study are Political Theory and Comparative Politics. His current project is a comparative analysis of Montaigne and Zhuangzi on freedom, toleration, and the limits of government authority. His next project is a re-examination of the “Asian values” debate through a comparative analysis of David Hume and Mencius. His teaching interests at DKU include Ethics and Leadership, Global China Studies, U.S. Studies, Institutions and Governance, and Political Science.