Wenyu Dong

Research

My research, provisionally titled Working Through History: War Trauma in the Shaping of the Pictorial Press in Early Twentieth-Century China (1900–1936), investigates how the pictorial press became a key site where ordinary people represented and processed the recurring violence of the period—from the Boxer Uprising through warlord bloodshed to the eve of total war. Drawing on LaCapra’s concept of ‘working through,’ I treat publishing as an active labour that collectively processed war trauma and transformed wounds into knowledge of the recent past. The project recovers non-professional and anonymous contributors as historical actors, asking how pictorial production constituted a popular history-making for the wounded present.

My project is supervised by Dr Song-Chuan Chen and Dr Michael Bycroft.

Academic Background

2025-29 PhD in History, University of Warwick

2021-24 MA in Art History, Central Academy of Fine Arts, China

• First Prize, Excellent Graduation Thesis Award

2022-23 MA in Museum Studies, University of Manchester

2017-21 BA in Art History, Central Academy of Fine Arts, China

• Beijing Excellent Graduation Thesis Award

• Guardian China “Xu Bangda” Scholarship

Research Interest

• War trauma
• History of the press
• Modern Chinese visual and print culture
• Popular history-making