Research Topic

I'm a Ph.D candidate in history at the University of Warwick. Currently I'm working with Professor Anne Gerritsen and Dr Song-chuan Chen on a project with the title: 'Reshaping Food practices and Identities: Anglo-Sino Encounters in Late Qing Era'. This project is funded by China Scholarship Council-University of Warwick Scholarship.

This thesis aims to examine the changes and continuities of foodways of both Britons and Chinese living in port cities of China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I investigate how these changes interacted with the construction and reconstruction of their cultural, social, political, regional and national identities during this period. My research traces the way in which knowledge and practices of food were exchanged, mixed, modified and applied in different settings of Anglo-Sino encounters. In particular, it considers the ways in which social, cultural, economic and political changes influenced this process during the transition from Canton System to Treaty System in the late Qing era. Through a detailed scrutiny of food practices, my thesis contributes to a greater understanding of dynamic power relations between China and Britain during this period.

Office hour: Wednesday 13:00-14:00 during term time. Please use this link to book a slot: https://leiyun.youcanbook.me

Teaching

Associate tutor, University of Warwick, October 2020-December 2020

• HI112-30 Mongols, Ming, and Manchu: China, 1500-1800

Research Interest

• Food History
• Sino-Western Cultural Interactions
• Global History
• Women's and Gender History

Education

• Ph.D (2018-present) University of Warwick (History)
• MA (2016-2017) King's College London (Early Modern History)
• BA (2012-2016) Wuhan University (World History)

Conference and Workshop presentations

• Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics, 1500 to the Present, Workshop, 21-23 May, 2021
• Dublin Gastronomy Symposium, May 25-29. 2020

Topic: Reshaping Food Practices and Identities: Anglo-Sino Encounters in Canton, published online:https://arrow.tudublin.ie/dgs/2020/postcol/1/

• Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways, Graduate Student Workshop, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, US, 5 – 7 December 2019
• 17th Summer University Dedicated to Food and Drink Studies, Tours, France(August 25-September 1,2019) with a bursary of €225 from IEHCA

Topic: Food Supply for East India Company in Canton, 1730-1830

• 5th International Conference on Food History and Food Studies, Tours, France (June 6-7,2019)

Topic: Consuming China: British People’s Eating and Drinking Experiences in Canton, 1700-1830

• GHCC Workshop at the University of Warwick: My Voyage around the World: The Atlantic and Pacific Travels of a Late Sixteenth Italian Merchant, Warwick(April 30, 2019)

Topic: Carletti and Fruits in China

• KCL World History Student Conference, London, UK (May 6,2017)

Topic: Feeling the Pulse: The Divergence of European and Chinese Medicine in seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries

Other positions

• Nov 2019 – present founding member of Food and Drink History Reading Group at Warwick (our website:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/seminars_readinggroups/foodhistory)
• July 2019 – present member of the organising committee for the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender Graduate Seminar Series
• June 2019-present member of European Institute for History and Cultures of Food network
• April – May 2019 member of the organising committee for the Department of History Postgraduate Conference
• April 2019-present member of Drinking Studies Network

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