RESEARCH INTERESTS

China, East Asia, Southeast Asia; Environmental history, history of science and technology, economic history

BIOGRAPHY

Yiyun Peng received a PhD at Cornell University in 2023 and joined the Department of History at the University of Chicago as a D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia Postdoctoral Fellow. Peng's current book project demonstrates how the popularization of a few cash crops and the handicraft industries processing them into commodities--indigo dye, bamboo paper, tobacco, and ramie (a fiber plant) cloth--led to a herbaceous revolution in upland Southeast China from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, which profoundly transformed the region's environment and society.

DISSERTATION

In its dissertation form, this project won the Messenger Chalmers Prize for the best dissertation in the Department of History at Cornell:

A Herbaceous Revolution: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970

Abstract: This dissertation scrutinizes a few important cash crops and handicraft industries that processed them into commodities—indigo dye, ramie cloth, tobacco, and bamboo paper—in upland Southeast China. Through these crops and handicraft industries, mountain people there developed a revolutionary, herbaceous economy that profoundly changed the highland environment and its society, and integrated this region into larger domestic and overseas markets through the exports of these commodities to coastal China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and beyond from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Highlands have often been dismissed as economically and socially isolated and backward, largely associated with activities such as lumbering, mining, hunting, and other enterprises that were deemed typically mountain businesses. This dissertation goes beyond these scopes and probes deeply into agro-industrial activities that constituted the herbaceous economy. It also demonstrates how the late imperial and modern states’ economic, agricultural, and industrial policies adjusted to this economy over the course of time. In addition, this dissertation reveals how mountain people’s economic lives were deeply embedded in the environment. As these crops do not require much water, heat, or fertilizer, mountain people used them to cultivate their habitat where resources like water, sunlight, and fertile land were insufficient, thus optimizing land use. To process these crops into commodities, mountain people also built production facilities that adapted to the difficult environment so as to utilize the environment, which eventually also reshaped it. In all, the focus on the highlands refreshes our understanding of the economy of late imperial and modern China, which has been understood by scholars to center on the lowland production of rice, cotton, and silk. Ultimately, the highlands-centered approach ushers in a rethinking of the highlands as a complex and active economic, ecological, and technological system.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, University of Chicago
Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Assistant Professor, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw (on sabbatical 2023–2026)

PhD'18 University of Warsaw

RESEARCH INTERESTS

visual and material culture; critical archives; oral history; cultural history; historical anthropology; migration and displacement; diaspora studies; transnational history; Central and Eastern Europe.

BIOGRAPHY

My current project, “Critical Archives of Ordinariness: Vernacular Moving Image Practices and Migrant Identity in Polish Chicago” (acronym: Not-So-Ordinary) investigates home movies and related oral histories of Polish Chicago before the digital era to challenge and broaden our understanding of evolving migrant and diaspora identities. Following critical archive studies’ call to empower communities underrepresented in historiography by developing and interrogating archival collections, the project juxtaposes home movies – “ordinary” motion pictures created for family and close friends – with interviews with their creators to uncover the “not-so-ordinary” capabilities of this underused data source for studying minority groups. The project investigates a specific case: the interplay of vernacular moving image practices and the transformations of Polish diaspora identity in Chicago; however, it leads to conclusions of wider significance. it contributes to cultural anthropology by identifying the role of vernacular moving image practices in shaping identities; it advances media archeology by showing how evolving analog home movie technology altered vernacular moving image practices; it expands the field of transnational history by investigating home movies circulating between countries; it demonstrates how to contextualize historical home movies by creating a research collection of home movies and related oral histories; it advances research methods by providing guidance on home movies as a research source and by showing the use of the movie-interview analytical unit. The Not-So-Ordinary project is funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action and implemented at the University of Chicago (academic years 2023/24 and 2024/25) and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (academic years 2025/26).

In my PhD thesis I examined the “life of things” – transnational history of material culture from the perspective of post-WW II Poland. I introduced three analytical categories of things – found, hospitable, and newfangled – and showed how they improve the understanding of the relationships between people and objects in the situation of austerity and displacement. The thesis was published by the University of Warsaw Press (2019) and won the Inka Brodzka-Wald Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the contemporary humanities in Poland.

I completed my PhD at the University of Warsaw (2018, summa cum laude). I spent part of my PhD studies at University College London (2014) and Indiana University Bloomingotn (2016). I have been a postdoc at the Univeristy of Chicago (2019) and Indiana University Bloomingotn (2022). Since 2020, I have been an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw (currently on sabbatical leave 2023-2026). My research has been supported by European Commission, Polish National Science Centre, and  Kosciuszko Foundation, among others.

In my academic work, I strive for socially relevant historical inquiry, research-based teaching, and inspiring outreach.

PhD 2016 (History) University of Virginia

RESEARCH INTERESTS

African American history, the civil rights movement; black economic thought; the history of the rural South