RESEARCH INTERESTS

Gender, labor, technology, and economics in modern China

BIOGRAPHY

Yuanxie Shi is a historian of gender, labor, technology, and economics in modern China. After receiving her doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in August 2025, she has joined the Social Science Division there as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor.

Her dissertation, “Mao’s Clever Hands: Export Lacemaking and Socialist Flexibility in Cold War, 1949-1980s,” explores an uncharted history of socialist industrialization since 1949 and during the Cold War. Rather than focusing on mechanical manufacturing and factory settings, her research examines mass production through labor-intensive needlework by millions of Chinese women, specifically in rural Chaoshan region. This project reveals the subaltern status of rural women and bridges an overlooked social category in both the socialist hierarchy of values and the international division of labor.

PUBLICATIONS

Yuanxie Shi, “A China Carved and Collected: Ningbo Whitewood Figurines in the Long Twentieth Century,” Journal of Chinese History, 2019: 3(2): 381–407. 

Yuanxie Shi and Amy Chang, “Rouge Clair: Glass or Paint?” in Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, etc. New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020. 

Yuanxie Shi and Laurel Kendall, “Who Miniaturises China? Treaty Port Souvenirs from Ningbo” in Life in Treaty Port China and Japan, edited by Donna Brunero and Stephanie Villalta Puig. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.