Advisor(s): Matthew Kohrman, Haiyan Lee, Ban Wang, Matthew Sommer
My dissertation, Haptic Horizons: On the Cultural Politics of Hands in Modern China, aims to produce new understandings of intimacy, alienation, labor, and violence in the modern era through the interdisciplinary study of tactile culture. The project explores the many powers invested in human hands through narrative, asking how literature, film, and visual culture produce historically-shifting protocols of touch, as well as how stories assign socially-contingent meanings to the way people use their hands. In taking up these questions, my research not only contributes to the China field’s emerging interest in sensory experience, but also opens up a new vista for sustained future inquiry about how tactility interacts with sight, scent, and sound in a comprehensive aesthetic discourse of the body.